The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Doubleday, Doran, $5.00]
IT is seldom that one finds a military and a literary genius living in the same skin; one searches in vain for such a figure from Cæsar to Lawrence. That Lawrence was a military genius is assured by no less an authority than Liddell Hart, whose word we take in confirmation of our own deductions from Lawrence’s account of his years between Jidda and Damascus. His literary position is perhaps too recent a growth to judge properly, yet one feels that the combination of a classical youth with a Semitic manhood brought out in his writing a happy mixture of bright and sombre shades, a balance between clear pleasure and melancholy profundity.
Like æesar, Lawrence deals with himself objectively; although he writes in the first person, the sense is always in the third. He splits himself into two — Lawrence the mind looking at Lawrence the animated protoplasm through a microscope. If at one moment he appears boastful, in the next he seems unnecessarily self-critical; in his writing both modesty and shame yield to a concept of disembodied self-appraisal.
If this book were an obscure one, or if half the reading world were not already acquainted with the factual outline of Lawrence’s part in the Arab revolt, it would be the duty of a reviewer to sketch its main events. The principle, in this case, seems sufficient. Lawrence’s task was to stimulate and guide the revolt of the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire, and at the same time to serve the interests of the Allies in their defeat of the Central Powers. The two purposes were not identical. The Arabs wished to repeat the entry of Omar into Damascus; to bind together the empire of the early Caliphate, including Syria, Palestine, and Iraq, as well as the Arabian peninsula proper. Lawrence’s first desire was the furtherance of this ideal.
His second was to drive the Turks from the Arabicspeaking portions of Hither Asia, and to permit the British and French to divide the fatter portions of this region between them as they might see fit, as the SykesPicot treaty, prematurely exposed by the Soviets, indicated. Between these two wishes his mind was so torn that he tried, on several occasions, to be rid of the responsibility of what he considered fraudulent action. He left Damascus on the eve of its capture.
The teachings of the masters of strategy, whose works Lawrence had assiduously studied, took no account of the problem with which he was confronted. His men were not uniformed troops who had sacrificed independence of thought and action for the ideals of authority and cohesion; they were nomadic Arabs, among whom there was a tradition of anarchy, for whom death meant not a simple loss but a blood feud. His men were fast-moving camelry, jealous of all command, facile of movement, bad at sustained attack or defense; men who would pack up and ride home as soon as they had obtained sufficient booty. He did not want to capture towns, lest he lose his men; he could not risk engagements which entailed much loss of life, no matter how brilliant the victory, since his men were few and he must conserve them.
With these limitations, and with the situation as it was, his rôle was to harry the Turks along the Hejaz railway, from Medina to Damascus; to bother them enough to render them harmless, but not enough to force their evacuation, which would pile up too great a defense in the North. In all of this campaigning he had to reckon with two forces: the approval of his British superiors in Cairo, and the adhesion of Feisal and the tribal leaders. With the coming of Allenby, Lawrence found support for his plan, rather than a belittling acquiescence, and by the integration of the two Damascus was taken.
Since he died prematurely, Lawrence as a person will always remain an enigma, unless those who knew him intimately choose to amplify the disclosures in his own writing. As Lawrence depicted himself, and we must believe that he did this honestly, he was a living embodiment of duality. He shrank from pain, — he rather cryptically attributes this loathing to an evil experience in his youth, — while at the same time he punished his body more than most civilized men have done voluntarily. His humor is frequently, if not usually, sadistic, yet cruelty in others revolted him. He craved the fame which he acquired, yet no one has taken the trouble to force upon himself a greater humility and at the same time a more public obscurity. He had no use for women, yet perversion, which he condoned with sympathy in the Arabs, seems to have had no personal appeal to him. He was frequently disgusted with the British and spoke of himself as an Arab and of them as foreigners, yet he longed to leave Arabia and return to England.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not an easy book to read. To one not familiar with the details of northern Arabian geography, and few of us are, the multiplicity of place names is confusing. The geological details of plain after plain and mountain after mountain could intrigue only a specialist. He who thinks to pick this book up and dash through it as through a novel will in this sense be disappointed. Lawrence has the power to make a ride down a wady in the early morning, with no enemy near, seem important and exciting, while he describes bloodshed with a brief and cold detachment. If there are chapters in it that one can never forget, there are also others that few will remember.
In modern times there is little opportunity for men to perform deeds which are visibly heroic. Lawrence found his chance and pushed it to the utmost of his genius — and lived to write about it. No wonder that his later years were a squeezed fruit to him; that death, which he had so constantly ignored, should have taken him young, without terror and presumably without regret.
CARLETON S. COON