April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 30

By Paul Alkon

“I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows…. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire and to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.“—T. E. Lawrence

Writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom was for Lawrence an extended effort almost as exhausting as participation in the Arab Revolt itself. Reliving that adventure, while writing about it in successive drafts over seven years, greatly contributed to his post-war anomie.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

The initial manuscript was begun in Paris during the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and lost in November of that year when a suitcase containing it was stolen at Reading railway station—or so Lawrence claimed in one of several versions he gave of the first draft’s disappearance. He reports that he reluctantly wrote it again “with heavy repugnance in London in the winter of 1919-20 from memory and . . . surviving notes.”¹ Dissatisfied, he burned this second draft on 10 May 1922—except, oddly, for one page retained as a kind of souvenir.

Eight copies based on a third draft (the Bodleian manuscript) were printed by Lawrence at the Oxford Times press between 20 January and 24 June 1922. But he revised this draft so thoroughly while correcting press proofs that what resulted is really a fourth draft, identified now as the 1922 text. After sending its eight copies for comments to friends, among them George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, Lawrence revised the 1922 text, cutting out about fifteen percent, for the lavishly illustrated and handsomely printed 1926 Subscriber’s Edition: a holy grail among bibliophiles.

Only a bit more than 200 Subscribers Editions were made, about 170 with all illustrations, perhaps 211 in all. The exact number remains in doubt because Lawrence mischievously decided to thwart bibliophiles (and historians) by refusing to number the copies, to disclose how many had been made, even to make any two exactly alike. To meet printing expenses for the Subscribers Edition, Lawrence cut its text by about sixty percent and published the resulting abridgement in 1927 as Revolt in the Desert. This best seller in England and America was also serialized during December 1926 and January 1927 by the London Daily Telegraph.

Omitted in Revolt in the Desert are Lawrence’s most poignant personal statements and most of his general reflections, leaving a bare narrative of military events. Its popularity enhanced Lawrence’s legend while also cloaking him in further mystery because all but the few privileged readers of the Subscribers Edition could only wonder what Lawrence was holding back from his wider audience. On George Bernard Shaw’s advice, even the Subscribers Edition had appeared without Lawrence’s Introduction. This suppressed chapter was published posthumously, first by his brother A. W. Lawrence in a 1939 collection ofT. E. Lawrence’s essays called Oriental Assembly, and subsequently in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, starting with the 1940 Jonathan Cape edition.

In this Introduction Lawrence explains his grandiose intentions on behalf of the Arabs “to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.” But he also confesses his awareness that British promises to the Arabs were unlikely to be kept.

He confesses too his entire agreement with General Allenby’s strategy of waging an Arab Revolt to save English lives by “turning to our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey.” Lawrence states: “I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows….And we were casting them by thousands into the fire and to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours..The only need was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this was at last done in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred killed, by turning to our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.”

A source of anguish during and after the war for Lawrence was the contradiction between his genuine desire to help the cause of Arab nationalism and realization that he was unlikely to succeed and, perforce, an agent of dubious imperial expansion. Hence the bitterness of Lawrence’s final disillusionment: “…when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.”²

With such despair at heart Lawrence started his work as an adviser to Churchill in the Colonial Office. Afterwards Lawrence added in a footnote to Seven Pillars of Wisdom (as its final revision) that in 1921 “Mr. Winston Churchill was entrusted by our harassed Cabinet with the settlement of the Middle East; and in a few weeks, at his conference in Cairo, he made straight all the tangle, finding solutions, fulfilling (I think) our promises in letter and spirit (where humanly possible) without sacrificing any interest of our Empire or any interest of the peoples concerned. So we were quit of the war-time Eastern adventure, with clean hands, but three years too late to earn the gratitude which peoples, if not states, can pay.”³

Eighty-two years after the Cairo Conference, few will agree that it straightened all tangles in the Middle East. Perhaps, however, Lawrence was right to judge that Winston Churchill came as close to doing so as anyone.

Dr. Alkon is a Professor of English at the University of Southern California and a Churchill Centre academic adviser.

NOTES

1. T. E. Lawrence, “Introductory Chapter,” Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (privately printed, 1926; published 1935 by Jonathan Cape; reprint, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1962), 21.

2. Lawrence, “Introductory Chapter,” 21-24.

3. Lawrence, 283, note.