The Golden Warrior Quotes

“pressure on these lines would hamper Turkish troop movements and might even encourage local resistance once it was clear that the Turks could not long shift men for punitive actions. Even the Hawran Druze might be nudged towards a descent on Dera. Again everything hinged on the Druze. There is nothing of all this in the Seven Pillars beyond a reference to Lawrence’s unquiet state of mind on the eve of his journey: ‘A rash adventure suited my mood’ which, to judge from an all but erased note in his campaign jottings, was almost suicidal.41 Clayton. I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all our sakes try and clear up this show before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie. This is all very perplexing. Soon after, in the Seven Pillars version, Lawrence admitted to the haziest knowledge of what McMahon had offered Hussain and how the boundaries of French and British concessions in the Middle East had been drawn by Sykes and Picot. In the Seven Pillars he also confessed to bewildered shame when Nuri Shalaan proffered ‘a file of British documents’ allegedly filled with official promises, and asked which one he ought to believe. Lawrence remained silent about their contents and who had drawn them up. What is more bewildering is that, in his report to Clayton, Lawrence claimed he met Nuri and his son at el Azraq towards the end of the Syrian trip. Maybe then he briefly succumbed to a mood of despair. It would have been understandable, not in terms of what others had or had not promised the Arabs, but because all his Syrian contacts, including Nuri, had responded to his calls for bold commitment with wary procrastination. Lawrence was taking enormous risks by penetrating enemy territory where pro-Turkish sympathies were still widespread. There was, he claimed, a £5,000 reward for his capture, which, if true, suggests that Turkish intelligence was aware of his activities. In fact, the head money was a general reward first announced some months earlier by Fahreddin Pasha for British officers taken dead or alive.42 Whether he travelled in search of intelligence or whether to get killed”
― Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia