T. E. Lawrence

British soldier and writer

• Born: August 16, 1888
• Birthplace: Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales
• Died: May 19, 1935
• Place of death: Bovington, near Clouds Hill, Dorset, England

Lawrence introduced striking innovations when he directed the operations of Arab irregular forces during the desert campaigns of World War I in 1917 and 1918. He then captured much of the world’s imagination by describing his exploits in memoirs that have been called “one of the greatest modern epics in the English language.”

Early Life

The second of five sons, T. E. Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, Wales, into a household sustained by what charitably could be called a bigamous union. His father, Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, from a landed family in Ireland, had previously married another woman, by whom he had four daughters, before he decided that life with her was insufferable. After a time, he ran off with Sarah Junner, the family’s governess; over the years they took up residence at various locations. The father sometimes used the surname “Lawrence,” and it was chosen for each of their children when birth certificates were prepared. It remains unclear precisely when any of the boys learned of the irregular circumstances surrounding their origins; certainly when it came, the knowledge was a burden to them in later life. It would seem that whatever influence was exerted by the parents came largely from their mother, who attempted with limited success to instill her religious precepts in her children.

A somewhat greater semblance of settled family life was achieved when they moved to Oxford in 1896. As a boy Lawrence received much of his early education at Oxford High School; evidently, he was also fond of strenuous exercise and liked pranks of every sort. He further conceived an interest in castles and military architecture, and beginning in 1906 he spent parts of three summers in France, where he went about by bicycle to visit historical sites. In 1907, he entered Oxford University, where he read modern history. Persuaded that the examples set by fortifications in Western Europe had influenced the development of such constructions farther east, he proposed a thesis on this topic, and in 1909 he traveled alone to Syria, Palestine, and other parts of the Middle East. In 1910, he was awarded first-class honors in his chosen field; in 1936, his thesis, with letters and other materials, was posthumously published in two volumes as Crusader Castles. He received a grant to facilitate further research and travel in conjunction with an archeological expedition supported by the British Museum. He also worked with Charles Leonard Woolley, an important specialist on the ancient Near East; much of their time was spent at a site on the northern course of the Euphrates, where artifacts of Hittite settlements were coming to light. Other work farther south was carried out under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Two volumes on work at these locations, published in 1914 and 1915, listed Lawrence as a coauthor. Much of the time, when he was not attending to excavations, Lawrence explored the countryside; at times he amused himself by devising odd provocations to arouse the suspicions of Ottoman officials and German agents in the region. Along the way, he acquired a passable knowledge of conversational Arabic, enough to make himself understood, though not with the fluency or grace of a native speaker.

Except in certain notable but indefinable respects, Lawrence did not present an imposing figure. He was about five feet five inches, and seemed yet more diminutive as his head was disproportionately large in relation to his body. He had light blond hair and a fair complexion, which eventually became a reddish brick hue from prolonged exposure to the Levantine sun. He had a strong, pronounced jaw and a broad, curved nose; his lips were thick and sensuous. Many observers, however, testified to the uncanny character of his clear blue eyes, which at times suggested visionary or hypnotic qualities. On the other hand, he had a high-pitched voice that often turned into a sort of nervous giggle. Curiously enough, regardless of whether he ever actually was taken for an Arab, he was able to win acceptance among the peoples of the area with his seemingly indomitable stamina and his extraordinary aptitude for leadership.

Life’s Work

After the outbreak of World War I in Europe, the Ottoman Empire entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers, and in November, 1914, Great Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman state. British officials in Egypt established contact withḥusayn ibn ՙAlī, the grand sharif of Mecca, and offered to support some form of Arab national sovereignty in lands then under Ottoman control. In June, 1916,ḥusayn cast his lot with the British after he raised a force of Arab soldiers that expelled Ottoman troops from the holy city. The insurgents also achieved some advances on the coast. Their opponents held Medina, however, while efforts to dislodge them from other inland cities, or positions to the north, seemed to pose a daunting task.

At the outset of the war Lawrence obtained a commission in the Geographical Section of the War Office; he then worked with military intelligence in Egypt, where for a time he was involved in drawing up maps of the Sinai peninsula. The further effects of the world conflict were brought home to him when two of his brothers were killed in France in 1915. His work with Arab forces began in October, 1916, when with a British colleague he met Abdullah, the sharif’s second son, at Jidda on the Red Sea. Lawrence traveled on to the camp of Faisal, the third son of their Arab ally; though the prospects there seemed far from hopeful, he counseled against the transfer of British ground forces to the region. Instead, Lawrence offered to act as an adviser and liaison officer alongside Faisal’s men.

There were other British personnel who at times had parts to play in the Arab campaigns; among the more notable were Colonel Pierce C. Joyce, Lawrence’s immediate superior, and Colonel Stewart F. Newcombe. Others assisted the Arabs by providing munitions and modern weapons. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that Lawrence consistently exercised leadership both in devising operations plans and in actually directing the efforts of Arab guerrillas in the field. Some of his accounts are of doubtful veracity, and it has been contended that Faisal and other Arab leaders in the end took many of the decisions that gave some coherence and shape to the desert campaigns. On the other hand, the tactical innovations employed against Ottoman forces bore the stamp of Lawrence’s conception of guerrilla warfare. Moreover, he believed that by appearing in Arab dress he would win acceptance more readily, and this additional, characteristic touch, preserved in many later portraits of Lawrence, further enhanced the impression he created among his followers. In January, 1917, he was on hand as Faisal’s soldiers surrounded and captured Al Wajh, on the Red Sea; Lawrence also was involved in plans for the Arab armies’ march on Aqaba, opposite the Sinai peninsula, which was captured in July, 1917. As Ottoman forces obdurately continued to hold out in Medina, Lawrence supervised a series of demolition raids on the Hejaz Railway, to interrupt communications and transport. During the autumn, attacks on Ottoman positions were planned, so far as was possible, to coincide with the advance of Allied forces into Palestine under the command of General Sir Edmund Allenby. In certain instances Lawrence himself set dynamite charges or other explosives on bridges or along railroad tracks; even with valiant efforts, however, he and his men failed to destroy a strategically located structure over the Yarmuk River in southern Syria.

Lawrence later gave out several different accounts of a visit to Der’a, a city south of Damascus; in all of them he maintained that, while reconnoitering the area, he was apprehended by Ottoman soldiers and brutally misused in the presence of the local governor. Some versions of the story suggest homosexual rape by various parties. Turkish materials, and the evidence provided many years later by others who were then in the area, cast doubt on Lawrence’s story, though not to the extent that such an episode could be ruled out. It would seem that, reticent as he was on such a painfully sensitive issue, Lawrence had fewer reasons for exaggeration or the exercise of his imagination than in discussing his military exploits. Whatever happened, it is known that he returned to friendly forces and was present at General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem, in December, 1917. In January of the next year, Lawrence led troops in a victorious pitched battle at Tafila, southeast of the Dead Sea. During the spring various raids succeeded in cutting the Hejaz Railway entirely at certain points.

The last phases of the desert campaigns, for which he held high hopes, were marred first during an engagement at Tafas, in southwestern Syria. There, according to Lawrence, he and his followers exacted bloody vengeance against enemy prisoners in retribution for Ottoman atrocities against the local population. On October 1, 1918, the day after Arab insurgents had begun to take power within the city, Lawrence arrived in Damascus and was confronted with the daunting task of establishing public order in some form. Moreover, charges that even while encouraging the Arab revolt Great Britain had acted in bad faith could not be put to rest. He had taken no part in the secret agreement negotiated in 1916 between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, which on behalf of Great Britain and France had divided much of the Middle East into zones of direct and indirect influence. Still, Lawrence felt a morbid sense of guilt for what he regarded as a betrayal of the cause for which many Arabs had sacrificed and endured much. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, by which Great Britain had pledged its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, probably was a lesser matter to him; Lawrence was by no means anti-Zionist. Lawrence’s own political outlook was subject to varied oscillations. Nevertheless he was disquieted by the air of perfidy that had come to be associated with Anglo-French planning for the Middle East. He acted as Faisal’s adviser at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where his beliefs and expectations were focused on the specific problem of restricting French influence in the Levant. He repeatedly lobbied against the ultimate award of mandatory powers in Syria and Lebanon to France but was unable to obtain recognition for Faisal’s Arab claims. In 1921, Lawrence became an adviser to the Middle Eastern Department of the British Colonial Office, and thus took some part in the decisions by which Faisal was made the king of Iraq, which was maintained as a British mandatory state. In a similar arrangement Abdullah became the king of mandatory Transjordan. While later Lawrence had nothing to do with ongoing concerns in the Middle East, he was disheartened to learn thatḥusayn, the original leader of the Arab revolt, had been displaced in Arabia by Ibn Saՙūd, the founder of the Saudi kingdom.

Lawrence’s war record had created a distinctive image and aura. In 1919, London newspapers referred to him as Lawrence of Arabia; the American journalistLowell Thomas, who had met Lawrence while reporting on the war in the desert, supplied yet further publicity. A lecture-documentary show was produced, which appeared first in New York and then in London. Evidently, this kind of presentation appealed to Lawrence’s instinctive flair for showmanship indeed he attended several performances but he also recoiled from the public attention that began to surround him. Thomas’s stage account was not overly accurate, but it captivated audiences with its portrayal of a heroic modern Arabian knight, and ever since, semilegendary connotations have in many ways been part of the general public’s conception of Lawrence.

On the other hand, determined to present matters from his point of view, Lawrence began work on an account of his own, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph . He added touches of mystification and some oddly exaggerated claims that if anything seemed to make any dispassionate assessment of his role in the Arab campaigns yet more difficult. A trial version of this work was published in 1922, and subscribers’ copies were produced in a limited edition of 1926. An abridged version of the main work appeared in 1927 as Revolt in the Desert. The release of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a commercial edition in 1935, shortly after Lawrence’s death, was a major publishing event; the work baffled readers as much as it enlightened them. While it was received as a major landmark in the literature of World War I, historians were hard put in some instances to distinguish between those episodes that could be taken as historical fact though there were enough of those and the improbable claims Lawrence willfully was prone to make. Its evocation of the grim majesty and horrors of war, however, was achieved in an oddly individual writing style that seemed peculiarly suited for its subject. There are a number of morbid and openly shocking passages. In addition to Lawrence’s account of detention and torture at Der’a, there are descriptions of his killing a wounded Arab, to preclude a more gruesome end at the hands of the Ottomans; the grim massacre at Tafas, where, as Lawrence would have it, enemy prisoners were summarily killed, is followed somewhat later by grisly descriptions of Ottoman dead decaying in the hospitals of Damascus. Odd and improbably humorous sequences are interspersed about the work. Some readers have been struck by curiously lyrical descriptive passages, which appear even in the middle of battle scenes. Lawrence’s own narrative, then, stood somewhere between historical autobiography and literature; in time it also contributed to the semimythical image that was growing up around the historical man.

Nervous strain left over from the war years, unatoned guilt over the peace settlement, growing reticence in the face of mounting public attention, and various personal or sexual traumas, or both, have been cited in explanation for the next, bizarre stages in Lawrence’s career. Although he had been promoted to colonel during his service in the Middle East and later had been offered various responsible positions in government, he seemed to prefer a simpler existence in some of the newer branches of the armed forces. In August, 1922, he enlisted as a private in the Royal Air Force under the assumed name John Hume Ross. After his presence there was revealed by London newspapers, he was released the following January, but two months later he joined the Royal Tank Corps, where he signed up as T. E. Shaw; he took this name legally through a deed poll in 1927. Much of the time he was stationed in England indeed he acquired a cottage in Dorsetshire, which he named Clouds Hill, in 1923 and during this period he evidently suffered odd crises affecting his emotional life. He never married, and claims that he voluntarily engaged in homosexual relations have found no substantiation. In 1925, he was transferred to the air force once more. For about two years he was stationed in India, but persistent, though unfounded, rumors about his intrigues in neighboring Afghanistan compelled the authorities to recall him in 1929. By this time he had completed a draft of The Mint , a semifictional study of his enlistment and training as a private in the armed forces. Because of its explicit and at times purposely shocking depiction of the seamy underside of military life, this effort was not published until 1955; an unexpurgated commercial edition appeared only in 1973. During his later period of military service, he worked on literary translations; the most notable of these was his rendition of Homer’s Odyssey, which appeared in 1932. He also worked with seaplanes and produced a technical manual on the use of advanced military sea craft. When he left the Royal Air Force in February, 1935, he had some hopes of resuming his literary pursuits; at other times he seemed oppressed by a sense of pervasive pessimism. Over the years, he had been fascinated by speed and motor vehicles; he often would race about the countryside on a custom-built motorcycle. On May 13, 1935, while traveling near his home, he swerved abruptly to avoid two boys on bicycles and was thrown violently forward onto his head. He was found in a coma; he never regained consciousness, and after six days he died at the Bovington Camp hospital in Dorsetshire.

Significance

Although much of his life was shrouded in mystery, which indeed he acted to heighten when he could, Lawrence left a twofold legacy that safely could be regarded as embracing his enduring achievements. His doctrine of guerrilla warfare, summarized in various of his writings, has served many later commanders as stating tactics by which irregular operations may be implemented. Lawrence’s grasp of the need to gain the sympathy and confidence of peoples among whom military efforts would have to be directed was matched by his understanding of the means by which opposing forces might be harassed by actions against which they could put up no effective defense. In an entirely different sense, Lawrence also left the world a vivid and perhaps inimitable example of the literary uses of military memoirs, which, sometimes in lurid terms, depict the storm and shock of battle. His recorded reactions to killing and responsibility for violent death are among the most sharply and poignantly stated treatments of this theme in any printed form. In addition to its somewhat uncertain historical value, Seven Pillars of Wisdom portrays the violent, the exotic, and the personal aspects of war in the desert in a manner that has proved fascinating to several generations of readers; in many ways it anticipated other literary accounts of the horror and suffering of war during the twentieth century.

In other ways, Lawrence’s life and exploits remain enigmatic. For one thing, it is rather difficult to measure his contribution to the campaigns fought during the Arab revolt; for that matter the extent to which Arab operations contributed to the final defeat of Ottoman armies is not easily assessed, particularly when they are compared with the efforts of the main Allied armies under General Allenby. The qualities that made Lawrence an effective leader were uncanny and seemed to elude precise definition. Many of his fellow combatants testified to his remarkable ability to instill in his men confidence in the success of what otherwise seemed to be highly perilous undertakings. Other sides of Lawrence’s character also pose questions, particularly as over the years the legend that grew up around him took on a life of its own; on the other hand, details about the darker side of his personal life were learned only many years after his death. Behind these contrasting images lurk the essential complexities of Lawrence’s nature. The contrast between self-promotion and self-abnegation was in evidence throughout most of his adult life. Nevertheless it is instructive that most later biographies, however they have handled his personal traumas, have accorded him a secure place in history both for his wartime activities and for his literary accomplishments.

Bibliography

Barr, James. Setting the Desert on Fire: T. E. Lawrence and Britain’s Secret War in Arabia, 1916-1918. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. A chronicle of the British-backed Arab revolt against the Turks that was the subject of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Brown, Malcolm. Lawrence of Arabia: The Life, the Legend. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Comprehensive biography, including details of Lawrence’s travels in the Middle East and his military career.

Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. A work that for anyone concerned with the Middle Eastern campaigns can neither be ignored nor accepted in its entirety. As history, it provides the most accessible source for some otherwise murky episodes; it is also probably a fair statement of the effects war had on Lawrence, and of his own conception of his unusual mission.

Liddell Hart, Basil Henry.“T. E. Lawrence” in Arabia and After. Rev. ed. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. This sympathetic portrait by one of Great Britain’s most important military historians accords Lawrence a place as one of the great captains of history. There are some inaccuracies owing to an overly literal acceptance of some early stories. Lawrence himself assisted in the original composition of this work. An American edition exists as Colonel Lawrence, the Man Behind the Legend.

Stewart, Desmond. T. E. Lawrence. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977. A well-researched critical study that has some interesting observations on British intelligence work during World War I. On certain issues, the author has gone beyond British records and consulted German documents as well as some Arabic materials. On some points, Stewart contests Lawrence’s veracity in a most severe fashion.

Tabachnick, Stephen E., ed. The T. E. Lawrence Puzzle. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. This collection of critical essays affords varying perspectives on the relationship between Lawrence’s literary efforts and the diverse facets of his military and political work. Among the contributors are important scholars whose work otherwise has appeared primarily in France, Germany, or Israel.

Thomas, Lowell. With Lawrence in Arabia. New York: Century, 1924. An account by the correspondent who made Lawrence an international celebrity, this work is often uncritical and lacking in historical perspective. However, it is vital for an understanding of the image that began to envelop the British officer in the public mind.

Yardley, Michael. T. E. Lawrence: A Biography. London: Harrap, 1985. This sprightly work is based in part on newspaper accounts from the period as well as British military and diplomatic archives. The author concludes with an assessment of past writing on his subject and a discussion of the numerous means, including film and drama, through which Lawrence’s exploits have been made a continuing source of fascination for many.