XXX
Lawrence wrote his great history of the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. or seven out of ten books of it, between February and June, 1919, in Paris. He did the present beginning of the introduction in six hours in the Handley-Page aeroplane, on his way from Paris to collect his belongings in Cairo: the rhythm of it is affected, he says, by the slow ‘munch, munch, munch’ of the great Rolls-Royce engines. In London he wrote an eighth book, but had all the eight stolen from him about Christmas 1919 while changing trains at Reading. Only the introduction and the drafts of two books remained.
He has never imagined a political motive for the theft, but his friends have. They even whisper darkly that one day the lost text may reappear in certain official archives. Lawrence himself hopes it will not: he had destroyed most of his war-time notes as he went along and when he began again the weary task of rewriting the quarter of a million words he could not quite trust his memory. However, Colonel Dawnay, who saw both texts, tells me that one chapter at least that he read more carefully than others in the original seems to be the same, word for word and almost comma for comma, in the second version. Lawrence still had two skeleton-diaries and some rough route-sheets, but little else.
This second writing was done in less than three months at the rate of some four to five thousand words a day. But Lawrence, immoderate as usual, did not keep to a daily ration. He did it in long sittings and probably set up a world’s literary record by writing Book VI in twenty-four hours between sunrise and sunrise without a pause. Book VI was about 34,000 words in length! ‘Naturally the style was careless,’ he says. But it served as a basis for a careful literary rewriting; which is the Seven Pillars as it was finally published. He wrote it in London, Jiddah and Amman in 1921, again in London in 1922, in the Royal Tank Corps near Dorchester in 1923 and 1924, and in the Royal Air Force at Cranwell in 1925 and 1926. He checked the historical accuracy with the help of all available official documents and his British friends who had served with the Arab army.
Lawrence does nothing by halves and not only set about making the book a history of the Arab Revolt which the Arabs themselves would never write, but one that he would not be ashamed of as literature. For this last ambition he secured the advice of two of the best-known English writers and taught himself with their help to write professionally.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is, beyond dispute, a great book: though there is such a thing as a book being too well written, too much a part of literature. Lawrence himself realizes this and was once, indeed, on the point of throwing it into the Thames at Hammersmith. It should somehow, one feels, have been a little more casual, for the nervous strain of its ideal of faultlessness is oppressive. Lawrence charges himself with ‘literary priggishness,’ but that is unfair. His aim was, all the time, simplicity of style and statement and this he achieved in the most expert way. He has, somewhere, confessed to a general mistrust of experts and it may be that he should have carried it further, and dispensed with expert advice in literary matters too. (Possibly, though, in actual practice he did; he was always a difficult pupil.) On the whole I prefer the earliest surviving version, the so-called Oxford text, to the final printed book which was the version that I first read consecutively. This is a physical rather than a critical reaction. The earlier version is 330,000 words long instead of 280,000 and the greater looseness of the writing makes it easier to read. From a critical point of view no doubt the revised version is better. It is impossible that a man like Lawrence would spend four years on polishing the text without improving it, but the nervous rigor that the revised book gave me has seemingly dulled my critical judgment. I may add that Lawrence had foreseen the effect that the book would have on me and refrained for many years from letting me see it.
Lawrence was anxious to make the book as solid as possible, so he employed the best artists that he could find to do drawings for it under the art-editorship of Eric Kennington.
He published something more than a hundred copies for subscribers at thirty guineas apiece and gave away half as many more to friends. But he was so keen to do things well that he actually spent £13,000 on the edition—the reproduction of the pictures alone cost more than the subscrip-tions—leaving himself £10,000 out of pocket. It was to pay this debt to his backers (for he has no private means) that the abridgment Revolt in the Desert was undertaken for public sale. He made it in two nights, at Cranwell Camp, with the help of two other airmen, Miller and Knowles. The Seven Pillars was never intended for publication: it was to be a private record for Lawrence and a few friends. Revolt in the Desert was only published by the accident of the £10,000 debt. It is a series of incidents loosely strung together and purged of the more personal material. Single copies of the Seven Pillars now sell at extraordinary prices.
Lawrence has not made a penny himself from either of these books. He was scrupulous to arrange that when the debt of the Seven Pillars was paid off the extra money made by Revolt in the Desert should not go to him. It has been a set determination of his to make nothing out of the Arab war directly or indirectly. His army pay went towards the expenses of the campaign. His salary from Winston Churchill for the year at the Colonial Office he did not spend on himself either, but used it for official purposes. (On the other hand, Lawrence’s friends have much benefited by his generosity. The gift of a Seven Pillars with the note ‘please sell when read’ has been worth as much as £500.)
The success of Revolt in the Desert called for a French translation but when an application for the rights came from a Paris publisher Lawrence offered permission on one condition—that the book must bear on its jacket the inscription: ‘The profits of this book will be devoted to a fund for the victims of French cruelty in Syria.’ So there could be no French translation so long as he controlled the book rights.
I have never yet met with an explanation of the meaning Seven Pillars of Wisdom in all that has been written about the book. It is reminiscence from a chapter in the Book of Proverbs, part of which runs as follows:
‘Wisdom hath builded a house: she hath hewn out her seven pillars. She crieth upon the highest places of the city, “Whoso is simple let him turn in hither.... If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself.”’
The idea is, I believe, further elaborated in later Jewish theological writings. This title was all that Lawrence rescued from an earlier book of travel written in 1913 and destroyed in 1914; it compared the seven cities of Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, Aleppo, Damascus and Medina.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom will not be reprinted in Lawrence’s lifetime. It is not a book, people agree on Lawrence’s behalf, that should be published for a popular audience. (A simple member of the public, an electrician, was shown the most painful chapter while proofs were being passed. Then he could do no work for a week, but walked up and down the pavement outside his house, unable to rid his mind of the horror of it. The chapter about the Turkish hospital is almost as painful.) Also popular publication might, they say, involve Lawrence in a series of libel actions: he seems to spare nobody in his desire to tell the whole story faithfully (least of all himself). Again, the censor might, it is suggested, ban as obscene some of the more painfully accurate accounts of Turkish methods of warfare. But in any case Lawrence never intended publishing the book, except privately, so these remarks are really irrelevant. The book was first written as a full-length and unrestrained picture of himself, his tastes, ideas and actions. He could not have deliberately confessed to so much had there been any chance of the book coming out. Yet to tell the whole story was the only justification for writing anything at all. And once written a strictly limited publication of the book promised to remove the need of even thinking about that part of his life again.
The historical accuracy of Lawrence’s account has been jealously questioned by some overseas reviewers of Revolt in the Desert: he has been accused of self-interested exaggeration. However, as there were forty or fifty British officers, besides Arabs, as witnesses of his activities and as no one of them has challenged the accuracy of his statements, this criticism hardly calls for answer. Moreover, all the documents of the Arab Revolt are in the archives of the Foreign Office and will soon be available to students, who will be able to cross-check Lawrence’s account and are likely to find that his chief fault has been telling rather less than the truth.
It has been suggested that Lawrence’s part in the Eastern War was devoid of serious military significance. Part of a letter protesting against this point of view may be reprinted from a London weekly. I know the writer as an expert in these matters:
‘SIR,—
‘Your reviewer of Revolt in the Desert denies the Arab Army any “serious military significance,” and suggests that Allenby’s advance on Damascus would have been successful had it never existed. As one who took part in the Palestine campaign, and was for a considerable time entrusted with the preparation of the “Enemy Order of Battle,” may I affirm the contrary? The revolt of 1916 isolated the Assir Division of six battalions, destroyed two-thirds of the Hejaz Division of nine battalions and brought a new division (58th) from Syria to Medina. In the autumn of 1917 when Lord Allenby struck his first blow the equivalent of twenty-four battalions was strung out on the line from Deraa to Medina. I include mounted infantry and camel corps. Some artillery was also engaged. Had the Arabs sat still two-thirds of this force, which included good Anatolian units such as the 42nd and 55th Regiments, would have been available for the Gaza-Beersheba front. In 1918 the British threat to Transjordania only became possible because of the growing strength of the revolt and the increasing sympathy of the local Arab population for Arab success. Lord Allenby’s demonstrations and the activity of the Arabs tied up more and more Turks and some German units, and by September, 1918, reinforcements from Rumania (part of the 25th Division) and the Caucasian front (48th Division) liberated by the Russo-Rumanian collapse, had been used up east of Jordan instead of on the Palestine front. Without going into details of military organization and the dislocation of troops, dull reading to any but the professional military historian, I can confidently assert that the Arab Army of 4,000 fighting men and an uncertain number of occasional pillagers was worth an Army Corps to the British Army on the Palestine front, not only on account of the Turks, whom it kept busy in the wrong place, but on account of the strain it put on Turkish transport and supply.
‘Finally, may I remark that Lawrence and his Arabs saw a good deal more at Tafas than one mutilated Arab woman, and the wonder to me is not that they saw red then, but that they generally showed such astonishing restraint against an enemy who habitually shot his Arab prisoners, tortured Arab wounded with obscene ingenuity, and often indulged in gross brutalities, at the expense of non-combatants, women and children.
‘Yours, etc.,
‘B.’
The humour of the controversy lies in the siding of Lawrence himself with the critics of whom ‘B.’ disposes so crushingly. What is called ‘serious military significance’ is part of the whole modern theory of War, the seeking out and destroying by one side of the organized military forces of another—a theory which he rejected as futile and barbarous almost from the start. What Lawrence wanted, rather, was to achieve serious political significance for the Revolt by whatever means lay readiest to his hand. Actual fighting, as opposed to pin-pricking raids and demolitions, was a luxury that he indulged the Arabs in merely to save their self-respect. They could not have thought freedom honourably won without it. The capture of Akaba is a clear instance of an operation that, though it affected the more conventional war at Gaza and Beersheba, had in itself serious political rather than serious military significance. It was only by an accident that the Turkish battalion happened to bar the way at Aba el Lissan and invite destruction. The rest of the operation was more like a chess problem; white to play and mate in three moves.
This is not the place, and it probably is not the time to weigh up Lawrence’s strategy and tactics during the Arab Revolt. Of the strategy he makes no secret whatever. It lies in Revolt in the Desert open for anyone who can use a map intelligently. The Seven Pillars gives yet fuller details; the first number of the Army Quarterly (1920) contains a long article by him on the subject of irregular war—a summary of the results of his sick-bed theorizing in Emir Abdulla’s camp in March 1917. The obvious comment to be made on his strategy is that it enabled the Arab Revolt in the sphere of politics, as in the sphere of war, to assume a much larger share of influence and attention than its material importance justified. B.’s letter just quoted, had it compared the Arabs’ resources in arms and equipment, as well as in men, with those of the Turkish forces opposed to them, would have made the point still clearer. Lawrence would probably take this judgment as the highest praise, for we find him throughout insisting, with a repetition that conveys the painfulness of his problem, upon the extreme economy of means necessary. The material and military assistance that the Arabs could themselves provide, with all the goodwill in the world, was small. Nor might it be helped out by large borrowing of material and military resources from the Allies without a proportionate political debt when the fighting was over. Lawrence would therefore be proud to think that he made his little go such a long way—even the total of ten million pounds and the score or so of British casualties that the Arab Revolt cost Great Britain was a flea-bite compared with, for instance, the monthly cost of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in lives and cash-and that politically he made so much ado out of what had begun as little or nothing.
From the point of view of tactics, his conduct is far less clear. A casual reading of his books might lead one to suppose that he fought his battles with bluff and crimson banners for main argument; or even that the hypnotic effect that his presence seems to have had on the Arabs extended to the enemy, who were fascinated into stupidity—that the moon herself came under the influence and consented to open one of the more difficult gates to Akaba for him. But actually his tactics were, I believe, thought out with the same care and artifice, not to say humour, as his general strategic principles. And his reasons for slurring over the ways and means of fighting are connected with the political relations between the Syrian Government and the French in 1919 when he first wrote his book. Both sides were preparing for armed struggle in Syria and it looks as if Lawrence set himself to contribute nothing in the form of a manual of warfare that could be used in this struggle. His late re-draftings of the book at a time when the danger had become less acute only modified the literary style without adding (or taking away) much of the content. He had to select the materials to be used with great severity. His two active years provided enough for ten books of the size to which he limited himself—his memory was uncomfortably clear and full—so that wherever possible he sacrificed the details of the fighting.
He mentions, for instance, no more than three or four armoured-car actions in which he took part; but it seems that he fought at least fifty, enough to evolve a whole system and scheme of battle for them. (Readers of Revolt in the Desert will have found no more than two or three occasions mentioned on which Lawrence was wounded, against the four or five mentioned in the Seven Pillars; but the total number was nine times, including the occasion of Minifer when he had five bullet grazes, cuts from flying boiler-plate and a broken toe.) Nor is adequate mention made in either book of the numerous engagements in which he tempered his body-guard into a real fighting weapon. We can only gather, from casual allusions, that he did not leave the tactics of the desert as he found them.
He based his strategy on an exhaustive study of the geography of his area; of the Turkish Army; of the nature of the Bedouin tribes and their distribution. So he based his desert tactics on a study of the raiding parties of the Arabs. As we have seen, one of his first actions on being posted as military adviser to Feisal was to accompany a raid on the Turkish force attacking Rabegh. And he continued this self-education, in the school of Auda and Zaal and Nasir, until after the occupation of Akaba. Only by graduating in this Bedouin school could he win the experience and prestige that would allow him to modify its traditions.
Exactly what these modifications were is nowhere explained, though they seem to have achieved a greater unity of purpose among the members of the raiding party, at the more critical moments before and after the attack, without impairing the self-reliance and self-sufficiency of any individual. His English companions knew the difference between an Arab raid when he was present and one when he was not present; but they were not professional soldiers, nor students of war, so could not put their finger on the precise points of difference. And he himself, except in the battle fought north of Tafileh, withholds any account of himself in command. This battle proves what we knew already, that he relied on automatic rifles and not on ordinary rifles. The rapid-fire exercise, with an ordinary rifle, of fifteen to thirty aimed shots a minute, saved the British Expeditionary Force at the first battle of Ypres in face of enormously superior machine-gun fire; but it was only perfected by years of intense musketry training. The Bedouin Arabs would never have had the patience to master it and in any case it would have been of little use to them in camel-fighting.
Bayonets he scornfully rejected with the memorandum (to General Headquarters!) that they were ‘unintelligent masses of steel, generally fatal to the fools behind them.’ He might have added that the Turk, a good man with the bayonet, would have welcomed this choice of weapons. Machine-guns, except when armoured, were less suited for his battles than automatics because their longer bursts of fire did not make up for their greater weight and cumbersomeness. There is one recorded case of a British machine-gun sergeant, in France, picking up his weapon and using it like a rifle, but he was a giant. When it came to a choice between Lewis and Hotchkiss automatic rifles, he preferred the Hotchkiss, because it was not so easily jammed by mud and sand; but the files of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force Headquarter Office were full of his demands for quantities of either or both. The battle of Tafileh is a neat example, though not, one gathers, his first, of what is technically known as ‘attack by infiltration,’ with automatic rifles to the fore. Lawrence seems, before this, to have reduced his gun-crews to two men and a gun. His body-guard of forty-eight men had in one fight with a Turkish cavalry regiment (place and date unfortunately are not available) twenty-one automatics. He himself carried an ‘air-Lewis’ (borrowed from the Air Force) in a bucket on his camel-saddle. He once said that if he could get control of an arms-factory to make him Hotchkiss guns he would supersede the use of the rifle in war. A pleasant gift to civilization!
Lawrence’s attitude to war, by the way, seems to be that he has no stronger objection to war, as war, than to the human race as the human race; but he does not like wars in which the individual is swallowed up in the mass. He commented to me once on the anti-war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, who had the misfortune to serve, on the Western Front, in divisions that were accustomed to lose the equivalent of their full strength every four or five months, that had Sassoon been serving with him in Arabia he would have written in a completely different vein. That is very likely true. On the other hand, Lawrence’s revolt in the desert was a form of fighting so unlike ‘civilized’ war, and so romantically appealing, that it is perhaps fortunate that Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and the other poets who got badly involved in the war were all infantrymen in France.
Lawrence’s use of heavy machine-guns (Vickers’), in the armoured cars, developed from the first experimental raids after Akaba until he could use them in combined operations of camelry, armoured cars and aeroplanes. He was also able to improve on the regulation uses of high explosive as laid down in the Manual of Field-Engineering. He discovered how to fire electric mines along the telegraph wires and how to introduce petards into the fire-boxes of railway locomotives by ‘salting’ their wood-fuel piles with infernal contraptions that would escape the notice of the firemen. But so strongly was he moved by a sense of what we may call the ‘literary style’ of the epical romance in which he found himself a leading character—a ‘many-wiled Odysseus’ let us say—that he always saw his own scientific ingenuities as things alien and incongruous in the Arab setting. We are therefore left with only shadowy clues as to their importance and effectiveness in the campaign.