Torment in the desert: review of Lawrence Of Arabia’s War

THERE are two major obstacles to studying the desert theatre in the First World War. The first is the refusal of Turkey to open her military archives for scholarly research. As long as Turkey chooses to align with the West, Nato and ultimately the European community, she has a strong interest in suppressing information about the Armenian genocide, an episode of medieval barbarity, usually marked as happening in 1916 but continuing until 1922, a year otherwise distinguished by peace treaties and reconciliation. The other is the figure of a minor archaeologist, academic and military square peg called Thomas Edward Lawrence.

“Lawrence of Arabia” was the creation of an American called Lowell Thomas who in 1919 put on a West End show about the desert war, a blockbuster mix of travelogue, documentary and fantasy that cast Lawrence as a latter-day Raleigh, Gordon and Clive. In sceptical minds it created a simple syllogism: if TE Lawrence appeared in a show, then TE Lawrence was by definition a showman, and therefore untrustworthy. That image was perversely reinforced by the book that was supposed to put the record straight. At the same time as Thomas’s tableau vivant packed in crowds, Lawrence, no longer the “Uncrowned King of Arabia” but a fellow of All Souls, was starting work on a memoir whose chief shortcoming turns out to be its meaninglessly sonorous title.

Since Jeremy Wilson’s authorised biography in 1989 (which just missed the Lawrence centenary), we’ve known that Seven Pillars Of Wisdom tells pretty much the accurate truth about Lawrence’s exploits. It also reveals a mind torn by self-loathing. Lawrence was a bastard, short of stature, and unhappily homosexual. His commitment to the Arab cause may have stemmed from his love for an engaging young man called Dahoum, who was fated to die in the Syrian famine and epidemic.

However, Neil Faulkner goes beyond psychohistory and places Lawrence’s endeavour in a wider political and cultural context. He gives the best short account I’ve read of Gallipoli, dramatic, vivid but still subtly inflected; and he explains the strategic battle in London between (largely) military “Westerners” who wanted to concentrate Allied effort on Flanders and France and (largely) political “Easterners” who thought the most effective way to defeat the Central Powers (and protect the gates to India) was to kick away the Kaiser’s walking stick in the East.

Every schoolchild knows – or knew – that pre-war Turkey was the “sick man of Europe” and the Turkish military has never had a good press; in David Lean’s epic film, Johnny Turk is essentially an Apache with dubious hygiene and sexual morals. And yet, as Faulkner shows, the Anatolian peasant proved to be a doughty and effective soldier who for all the failings of command and materiel above him was a hard man to break down. This introduces one of the book’s many fascinating oppositions, for while the Turkish soldiery were passionately attached to the land, Lawrence’s Arabs (if that doesn’t sound proprietorial) were committed to movement, put their faith in tribal and familial relationships rather than soil. This was a conflict between sand and the sown. It is well known that desert Arabs trust individuals, not institutions, and they trusted Lawrence who came out of nowhere, speaking their language, promising fidelity and ratifying their instinctive commitment to the pinprick raid, to the tactics of impulsion rather than detailed planning, and to improvisational movement across the desert’s blank canvas. The Bedouin fighter fares best when widely scattered, and badly when concentrated into conventional units.

The other star of Thomas’s London show was General Allenby, who gave Jerusalem to Lloyd George as a Christmas present. Allenby was not only Lawrence’s opposite – obsessively dapper, fiercely bullish and professional, by no means a soldier of passion – he was also Lawrence’s chosen father figure, venerated in Seven Pillars Of Wisdom as the man who “came nearest to my longings”; he talks of “worship”, of Allenby as an “idol”, as an eminence, a great ship or as a tank that “could smash through groves of guilty disaster”. Freudians wag their tails at this stuff, but Lawrence and Allenby together – insofar as each could bear to stand beside the other – brought down the Ottoman Empire, if any pair of men did. It was a highly industrialised theatre, mainly because of the endless need for water and the appalling difficulty of moving on sand, which was no easier going than Flanders mud, but it was also a war written out in strange script on a wholly alien background, according to rules unknown on the plains of Europe.

There seems little doubt that Lawrence was mentally ill. His later career and sudden death are well documented and much pored over, but Faulkner, in the real kicker to this extraordinary book, identifies a deeper source than sexual confusion or illegitimacy. Lawrence knew that his distant masters in Cairo and London (and their counterparts in Paris) wanted to carve up the Middle East. His mission to Feisal and the tribes was both passionately sincere and a lie. His depression, his boils and agues now seem like nothing but the outward symptom of a vastly cynical geopolitics whose failings and fallouts are with us to this very day. Every child that dies in Aleppo or Gaza is a victim of genocide, not that of the Turkish crucifier of 1916 but of the arbitrary and meaningless line on a paper map.