Selections for 21st Century Conditions, from
SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM: A TRIUMPH by T.E. LAWRENCE [of Arabia]
DE LUXE EDITION, 1938, GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO.
selections and italics by QMS
“Rebellion
was the gravest step which political men could take, and the
success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for
prophecy. Yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold player, and the
Arab epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through weakness, pain
and doubt, to red victory. It was the just end to an adventure which
had dared so much, but after the victory there came a slow time of
disillusion, and then a night in which the fighting men found that
their hopes had failed them. Now, at last, may there have come to
them the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they achieved
a deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of their
race.” 54
“The Sherif's
rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months: (standing
still, which , with an irregular war, was the the prelude to
disaster): and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: not
intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of
enthusiasm, that would set the desert on fire.” 67
“Men have
looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever
chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its
acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family
or claim to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had
their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink
of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who
would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account
and to exploit it or its product among others for private benefit.
The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the
elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his
own purposes and no more.” 84
“Neither Sykes
nor Picot had believed the thing really possible; but I knew that it
was, and believed that after it the vigour of the Arab Movement would
prevent the creation – by us or others – in Western Asia of
unduly 'colonial' schemes of exploitation.” 132
“It was a
natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more
than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the
votaries found their neighbors' beliefs cluttered with inessential
things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their
preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession,
soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on
the urban Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About
their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and
flowed liked the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with
the seeds of early death in its excess of rightness. Doubtless they
must recur so long as the causes – sun, moon, wind, acting in the
emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and
uncumbered minds of the desert-dwellers.” 148
“The first
confusion was the false antithesis between strategy, the aim in war,
the synoptic regard seeing each part relative to the whole, and
tactics, the means towards a strategic end, the particular steps of
its staircase. They seemed only points of view from which to ponder
the elements of war.
The Algebraical
element of things, a Biological element of lives, and the
Psychological element of ideas. The algebraical element looked to
me a pure science, subject to mathematical law, inhuman. It dealt
with known variables, fixed conditions, space and time, inorganic
things like hills and climates and railways, with mankind in
type-masses too great for individual variety, with all artificial
aids and the extensions given our faculties by mathematical
invention. It was essentially formulable.
… calculate how
many square miles? … And how would the Turks defend all that? No
doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army
with banners; but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence,
an idea, a thing intangible, in vulnerable, without front or back,
drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm
rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a
vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind;
and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so might we offer
nothing material to the killing.” 192
[about the Turks and Germans] “They would believe that
rebellion was absolute like war, and deal with it on the analogy of
war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon
rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” 193
[on the art of
war, defined by “war philosophers”, based on “the biological
factor”; reserves, #s, “effusion of blood”:] “A line of
variability, Man, persisted like leaven through its estimates, making
them irregular.” 193
“Nine-tenths of tactics were certain enough to be teachable in
schools; but the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher
flashing across the pool, and in it lay the test of generals.
It could be ensued only by instinct (sharpened by thought
practising the stroke) until at the crisis it came naturally, a
reflex.” 193
“The decision of what was critical would always be ours.
Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to
avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment.
We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown
desert, not disclosing ourselves until we attacked... We might turn
our average into a rule (not a law, since war was antinomian)
and develop a habit of never engaging the enemy.” 194
[on propaganda and preaching] “It was more subtle than tactics,
and better worth doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables,
with subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity
for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the
cultivation of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We
had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and
as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not
only our own men's minds, though naturally they came first. We
must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could
reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us
behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed
there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting
the verdict; and of neutral; circle beyond circle... There
were many humiliating material limits, but no moral impossibilities;
so that the scope of our diathetical activities was unbounded.” 195
“We had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend
nothing and shoot nothing. Our cards were speed and time, not hitting
power. The invention of bully beef had profited us more than the
invention of gunpowder, but gave us strategical rather than tactical
strength, since in Arabia range was more than force, space greater
than the power of armies.” 196
“'What will now happen with this knowledge?' asked Mohammed. 'We
shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make
glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo's; and yet
more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more
thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its
name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.'
'Why are the Westerners always wanting all?' provokingly asked Auda.
'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your
millions.' 'We want the world's end, Auda.' 'But that is God's,'
complained Zaal, half angry. 'And has each the Prophet and heaven and
hell?' Auda broke in on him. 'Lads, we know our districts, our
camels, our women. The excess and the glory are to God. If the end of
wisdom is to add star to star our foolishness is pleasing.” 282
“Jerusalem, was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had
made holy. Christians and Mohamedans came there on pilgrimage to the
shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political
future of their race. These united forces of past and the future
were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its
people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants,
living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Ideals of Arab
nationality were far from them...” 333
[on Syria and Syrians] “They were discontented always with what
government they had; such being their intellectual pride; but few of
them honestly thought out a working alternative, and fewer still
agreed upon one... Some cried aloud for an Arab kingdom. These were
usually Moslems; and the Catholic Christians would counter them by
demanding European protection of a thelemic order, conferring
privileges without obligation. Both proposals were, of course, far
from the hearts of the national groups, who cried for autonomy for
Syria, having a knowledge of what autonomy was, but not knowing
Syria, for in Arabic there was no such name, nor any name for all the
country any of them meant. The verbal poverty of their Rome-borrowed
name indicated political disintegration. Between town and town,
village and village, family and family, creed and creed, existed
intimate jealousies sedulously fostered by the Turks. Time seemed to
have proclaimed the impossibility of autonomous union for such a
land. In history, Syria had been a corridor between sea and desert,
joining Africa to Asia, Arabia to Europe. It had been a prize-ring, a
vassal, of Anatolia, of Greece, of Rome, of Egypt, of Arabia, of
Persia, of Mesopotamia. When given momentary independence by the
weakness of neighbors it had fiercely resolved into discordant
northern, southern, eastern and western 'kingdoms'... for if Syria
was by nature a vassal country it was also by habit a country of
tireless agitation and incessant revolt... The master-key of opinion
lay in the common language: where also, lay the key of imagination...
Patriotism, ordinarily of soil or race, was warped to a language... A
second buttress of a polity of Arab motive was the dim glory of the
early Khalifate, whose memory endured among the people... Yet we knew
that these were dreams. Arab Government in Syria, thought buttressed
on Arab prejudices, would be as much 'imposed' as the Turkish
Government, or a foreign protectorate, or the historic Caliphate.
Syria remained a vividly coloured racial and religious mosaic. Any
wide attempt after unity would make a patched and parcelled thing,
ungrateful to a people whose instincts ever returned toward parochial
home rule.” 335-6
“Then would come reaction; but only after victory; and for victory
everything material and moral might be pawned.” 337
“We should never try to improve an advantage. We should use the
smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place.” 337
“In a real sense maximum disorder was our equilibrium.” 338
“Any of our Arabs could go home without penalty whenever the
conviction failed him: the only contract was honour.” 339
“The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual
excellence; also the more sure the performance. By this substitution
of a sure job for a possible masterpiece, military science made a
deliberate sacrifice of capacity in order to reduce the uncertain
element, the bionomic factor, in enlisted humanity. Discipline's
necessary accompaniment was compound or social war – that form in
which the fighting man was the product of the multiplied exertions of
a long hierarchy, from workshop to supply unit, which kept him active
on the field.
The Arab war should react against this, and be simple and
individual. Every enrolled man should serve in the line of battle and
be self-contained there. The efficiency of our forces was the
personal efficiency of the single man. It seemed to me that, in
our articulated war, the sum yielded by single men would at least
equal the product of a compound system of the same strength.” 339
“Guerillas must
be allowed liberal work room: in irregular war, of two men together,
one was being wasted. Our ideal should be to make our battle a series
of single combats, our ranks a happy alliance of agile
commanders-in-chief.” 340
“We went about
in parties, not in stiff formation, and their aeroplanes failed to
estimate us. No spies could count us, either, since even ourselves
had not the smallest idea of our strength at any given moment. On
the other hand, we knew them exactly; each single unit, and every man
they moved. They treated us as regulars, and before venturing a move
against us calculated the total force could meet them with. We, less
orthodox, knew exactly what they would meet us with. “This was our
balance. For these years the Arab Movement lived on the exhilarating
but slippery tableland between 'could' and 'would'. We allowed no
margin for accident: indeed 'no margins' was the Akaba motto,
continuously in the mouths of all.” 381
“the civil
population of the enemy area was wholly ours without pay or
persuasion. In consequence our intelligence service was the widest,
fullest and most certain imaginable.” 385
“We
underestimated the crippling effect of Allenby's too plentiful
artillery, and the cumbrous intricacy of his infantry and cavalry,
which moved only with rheumatic slowness.” 385
“Yet I could not
explain to Allenby the whole Arab situation, nor disclose the full
British plan to Feisal.” 386
[on the revolt of the Arab peasantry] “They could only
rise once, and their effort on that occasion must be decisive.” 386
“I weighed the
English army in my mind, and could not honestly assure myself of
them. The men were often gallant fighters, but their generals as
often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.”
386
“The abstraction
of the desert landscape cleansed me, and rendered my mind vacant with
its superfluous greatness: a greatness achieved not by the addition
of thought to its emptiness, but by its subtraction. In the weakness
of earth's life was mirrored the strength of heaven, so vast, so
beautiful, so strong.” 512
“I explained
that we should live on the country. Young thought it a poor country
to live on. I called it very good.” 541
“I had been told
the theory, could repeat some of it: but it was in my head, and rules
of action were only snares of action till they had run out of the
empty head into the hands, by use.” 618
“My head was
working full speed in these minutes, on our joint behalf, to prevent
the fatal first steps by which the unimaginative British, with the
best will in the world, usually deprived the acquiescent native of
the discipline of responsibility, and created a situation which
called for years of agitation and successive reforms and riotings to
mend.” 636
“I had studied
Barrow and was ready for him. Years before, he had published his
confession of faith in Fear as the common people's main incentive to
action in war and peace. Now I found fear a mean, overrated
motive; no deterrent, and, thought a stimulant, a poisonous
stimulant, whose every injection served to consume more of the system
to which it was applied. I could have no alliance with his pedant
belief of scaring men into heaven... My instinct with the inevitable
was to provoke it.” 636
“Our aim was an
Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ
the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into
terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality
upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population
who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State
must rest.
Rebels,
especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and
worse governors. Feisal's sorry duty would be to rid himself of his
war-friends, and replace them by those elements which had been most
useful to the Turkish Government...
Quickly they
collected the nucleus of a staff, and plunged ahead as a team.
History told us the steps were humdrum: appointments, offices and
departmental routine. First the police. A commandant and assistants
were chosen: districts allotted: provisional wages, indents, uniform,
responsibilities. The machine began to function.” 649
“anyone who
pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their
masters must come out of it so strained in estimation that afterward
nothing in the world would make him feel clean.” 659
“We took
Damascus, and I feared. More than three arbitrary days would have
quickened in me a root of authority. There remained historical
ambition, insubstantial as a motive by itself. I had dreamed, at the
City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new
Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to
Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then
there was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to
call my beginning an ordinary effort.” 661
