Free Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda Page B

by the fact that diplomatic policy and military strategy were being formulated by a second-lieutenant in Cairo, perhaps because Lawrence’s opinions were so forcefully presented (and corresponded, in large part, with what everybody in London wanted to hear), and perhaps because Lawrence was the only person who had ridden out into the desert to see for himself what Feisal was doing. In any case, the result was—to Colonel Wilson’s great annoyance—that Lawrence was ordered back to the Hejaz to serve as a liaison officer with Feisal. On paper, he would be reporting directly to Wilson, but he would also be serving as Clayton’s eyes and ears in Feisal’s camp.
    In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence makes a grand show of his unwillingness to go, alleging that it “was much against my grain,” but this must be taken with a pinch of salt. In fact it seems more likely thatwhat Lawrence objected to was going to Rabegh, since this would place him too close to Wilson for comfort, whereas in Yenbo he would enjoy considerable independence, even more so once he journeyed inland and joined Feisal.
    In any case, whether Lawrence went willingly or not, it was the first step on the road that would eventually turn him into perhaps the most celebrated, exotic, and publicized hero of World War I.
    * This was the equivalent of the viceroy in India, a post to which Kitchener aspired, but never attained.
    * What the czar actually said, during a conversation reported by the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg in 1853–in the course of which the czar raised the possibility that russia and Great Britain might split up the ottoman empire between them–was: “We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill; it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.”
    * A kufiyya (spellings differ in English transliterations of Arabic) is the Arab head cloth; and an aba is a long cloak.
    * Except when quoting from other sources, as i do here from Storrs, i have elected to use whenever possible Lawrence’s own spelling for Arab names and places, which is relatively phonetic, but not necessarily systematic. “Abdullah,” “Abdulla,” and “Abdallah” are all possible spellings, and of course refer to the same person. Since the maps in the book come from various sources, the transliteration of place-names in them is not necessarily consistent, but it is easy enough to follow.
    * Lawrence’s spelling of Arabic names and places is erratic, and so is Storrs’s, but I have preferred to quote from letters and documents as they were written, rather than imposing on them a false conformity.
    * The “corpse-like obedience” much prized in the German army.
    * Liddell Hart also compared Lawrence to Sherlock Holmes for “his extraordinary perceptiveness of details which other men missed.”
    * others to whom he had a similarly intense initial reaction included his archaeological mentor D. G. hogarth; the english explorer of Arabia Charles Doughty; Field Marshal Lord Allenby; Winston Churchill; Marshal of the royal Air Force Lord trenchard, founder of the rAF; George Bernard Shaw; and Thomas hardy.
    * Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd ar-Rahman ibn Faysal ibn Turki Abd Allah ibn Muhammad Al Saud (c. 1880–1953), referred to as ibn Saud.
    * This was in part because the French consul in Beirut, François Georges-Picot, had fled from the consulate at the outbreak of war between the ottoman empire and France, leaving behind him in his desk drawer the names of Arab notables in Lebanon and Syria who had been in touch with him about Arab independence in the event turkey entered the war. For many of those on his list it was a sentence of death– twenty-one of them were hanged in 1916, many after months of terrible torture.
    † Lawrence was foremost among the British officers who would teach the Arabs everything there was to know about dynamite, gun cotton, and more modern high