Seven Pillars of Wisdom

by T.E. Lawrence

Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a

Khartum felt cool after Arabia, and nerved me to show Sir Reginald Wingate my long reports written in those days of waiting at Yenbo. I urged that the situation seemed full of promise. The main need was skilled assistance; and the campaign should go prosperously if some regular British officers, professionally competent and speaking Arabic, were

to the Arab leaders as technical advisers, to keep us in proper touch.

(Arabs had little colour-feeling against Africans: it was the Indian who evoked their race-dislike), and

me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin. I was unable to take the professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels were not

materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. Even from the

Our taking Wejh had the wished effect upon the Turks, who abandoned their advance towards Mecca for a passive defence of Medina and its railway. Our experts made plans for attacking them.

When we asked him to send them down to us with or without men, he would reply, first that the Arabs would not treat the crews properly, and then that they would not treat the guns properly. His price was a British brigade for Rabegh; and we would not pay it.

feared to make the Arab Army formidable—an argument one could understand—but the case of the British Government was incomprehensible. It was not ill-will, for they gave us all else we wanted; nor was it niggardliness, for their total help to the Arabs, in materials and money, exceeded ten millions. I believe it was sheer stupidity. But it was maddening

their constant passage made the lukewarm Billi ever more profitable to us. Feisal swore new adherents solemnly on the Koran between his hands, ‘to wait while he waited, march when he marched, to yield

messages from Clayton broke across this cheerful work with orders to wait in Wejh for two days and meet the Nur El Bahr, an Egyptian patrol ship,

every effort made to capture Medina, or to destroy the garrison when they came out. Newcombe

why Feisal wanted to fight the Turks, and why the Arabs helped him, and saw that their aim was geographical,

Turk from all Arabic-speaking lands in Asia. Their peace ideal of liberty could

exercise itself only so. In pursuit of the ideal conditions we might kill Turks, because we disliked them very much; but the killing was a pure luxury. If they would go quietly the war would end. If not, we would urge them, or try to drive them out. In the last resort, we should be compelled to the desperate course of blood and the maxims of ‘murder war’, but as cheaply as could be for ourselves, since the Arabs fought for freedom, and that was a pleasure to be tasted only by a man alive. Posteri...

was Arab country, and the Turks were in it: that was the one issue. My argument preened itself. The next day a great complication

men. If so, they would need six hundred thousand men to meet the ill-wills of all the Arab peoples, combined with the active hostility of a few zealots. How many zealots could

and tear. The war-philosophers had properly made an art of it, and had elevated one item, ‘effusion of blood’, to the height of an essential, which became humanity in battle, an act touching every side of our corporal being, and very warm. A line of variability,

In Turkey things were scarce and precious, men less esteemed than equipment. Our cue was to destroy, not the Turk’s army, but his minerals. The death of a Turkish bridge or

we attacked. The attack might be nominal, directed not against him, but against his stuff; so it would not seek either his strength or his weakness, but his most accessible material. In railway-cutting it would be usually an empty stretch of rail; and the more

We had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend nothing and to shoot nothing. Our cards

province would be won when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom. The presence of the enemy was secondary. Final victory seemed certain, if the war lasted long enough for us to work it out.

whose property it was, called our plain El Houl because it was desolate; and to-day we rode in it without seeing signs of life; no tracks of gazelle, no lizards, no burrowing

Palgrave, the Blunts, and Gertrude Bell amongst the storied travellers had crossed it, and I begged Auda to bear off a little and let us enter it, and their company: but he growled

capture of Akaba closed the Hejaz war, and gave us the task of helping the British invade Syria. The Arabs working from Akaba became virtual right wing of Allenby’s army in Sinai.

Christianity had had the fortune of later architects of genius; and in its passage through time and clime had suffered sea-changes incomparably greater than the unchanging Jewry, from the abstraction of Alexandrian bookishness into Latin prose, for the mainland of Europe: and last and most terrible passing of all, when it became

bags was a Morte D’Arthur. It relieved my disgust. The men had only physical resources; and in the confined misery their tempers roughened.

T. E. Lawrence read Morte D'Arthur during battle.

She was not tall, and looked heavy, but was docile and smooth to ride, turning left or right if the saddle-horn were tapped on the required side. So I rode her without a stick, comfortably reading a book when the march permitted.

Camels play a major role in this book

houses, and instead ate in the little cemetery, off a tomb, into whose joints were cemented plaits of hair, the sacrificed head-ornaments of mourners. Afterwards we went down

left alone. The camel-ticks, which had drunk themselves (with blood from our tethered camels) into tight slaty-blue cushions, thumbnail wide, and thick, used to creep under us, hugging the leathern underside of the sheepskins: and if we rolled on them in the night, our weight burst them to brown mats of blood and dust.

Lots of mentions of ticks throughout the book. very rough living in Arabia

outcast life among these Arabs, while I exploited their highest ideals and made their love of freedom one more tool to help England win. It was evening, and on the

who lived years abroad among strangers, went always dressed in the pride of our remembered country, that strange entity which had no part with the inhabitants, for those who loved England most, often liked Englishmen least. Here, in Arabia, in the war’s need, I was trading my honesty for her sustenance, inevitably.

but Abdulla dashed alongside me, swept his cloak about him, and sprang from his saddle, calfs skin in hand. He lighted with a splash of gravel in front of Ghazala, who had come to a standstill, gently moaning. On the ground before her he spread the little hide, and drew her head down to it. She stopped crying, shuffled its dryness thrice with her lips; then again lifted her head and, with a whimper, strode forward. Several times in the day this happened; but afterwards she seemed to forget.

afoot. I had had no concern with the Arab Revolt in the beginning. In the end I was responsible for its being an embarrassment to the inventors. Where exactly in the interim my guilt passed from accessory to principal, upon what headings I should be condemned, were not for me

spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty.

Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.

Thlaithukhwat, the old country whose almost imperceptible