Today, August 16, is the 136th anniversary of T.E. Lawrence’s birth. One of the twentieth century’s greatest men, Lawrence was indispensable to the Arab Revolt against the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire during World War I. While tens of thousands of his countrymen suffered and died on the Western Front, Lawrence led some of the most successful operations of the war thousands of miles away. He is without question one of Great Britain’s finest military heroes.
While Lawrence’s life may seem exotic and distant to Americans today, it can teach us many lessons, not only about warfighting but also of heroism in the modern world. Though certainly a flawed man, Lawrence possessed an almost knightly commitment to honor that fueled his immensely self-sacrificial leadership during the Arab Revolt. As American leaders consider how to shore up a world order facing pressure from China, Russia, and Iran, his example as a general and a statesman should still stand before the West as worthy of imitation.
The most recent biography of Lawrence was published earlier this year; Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T. E. Lawrence, by the adventurer and retired British military officer Ranulph Fiennes. In addition to recounting the events of the Arab Revolt, Fiennes intersperses the narrative with anecdotes from his service in the Sultanate of Oman during the Cold War, where he fought Marxist insurgents from Yemen. Fiennes finds parallels between his own experiences and Lawrence’s, likening both to a sort of crusade for freedom. Although Fiennes does not cover much new ground, the book is a worthwhile narration of the Arab Revolt’s events and full of interesting reflections on their greater significance.
A great deal of the romance behind Lawrence’s story comes from the immense spiritual strength he found fighting in the desert. Only in his late twenties when the Arab Revolt began, Lawrence was young, inexperienced, and certainly not battle-hardened. But the war against the Turks demanded physical courage and tactical genius. We remember and celebrate Lawrence because, having found something worth fighting for, he rose to the challenge history placed before him.
No doubt this inner strength was fueled by Lawrence’s immense ambition. In the beginning of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his memoir of the Arab Revolt, he explained his motivation to achieve such great deeds:
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant 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.”
It was precisely this spirit that inspired Fiennes as he embarked to the Middle East and took command of his own Arab troops. “It was all very well talking from behind a desk or imagining great adventures, but those things are suddenly different when a group of hostile men, whom you are meant to be leading, glare at you with contempt,” he reports. Fiennes learned from Lawrence, though, how the agent of a vast empire could cooperate with locals to bring about world-shaping events.
Lawrence aspired to the highest possible good: the liberation of a people. But he swiftly found that his Arab allies’ ideas about the future differed with his British sensibilities. “The Semites’ idea of nationality was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder,” he wrote in Seven Pillars. “Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it.” If he was to help the Arabs win independence from the Turks, he would have to understand their ways and culture as a native – including, famously, adopting various Arab mannerisms and habits of dress.
In this sense, Lawrence learned that freedom and democracy were not synonyms. To found an Arab nation, he could not simply replicate British institutions and customs. Instead, he had to make concessions to the Arab way of life as a set of lived-out practices, not a theory of how life should be. Rather than approach the illiberal customs and foreign conventions of his allies with disgust or contempt, he learned to appreciate the nobility and spiritual fortitude of Arab culture.
These people were not barbarians for being “full of the certainty of God” or loyal to their clans and tribes in ways unintelligible to Western rationalists’ understanding. As Fiennes put it, “Cut off from the materialism and self-interest of the West, [Lawrence] came to envy the Arabs’ simple lives and sought to protect it at all costs.” Self-government did not mean negating those traditions, but rather working through them to discover a new idiom of freedom the Arabs could call their own.
These lessons were reflected in how Lawrence fought the Turks. Throughout Seven Pillars, he compared desert tactics to naval warfare. Rather than merely replicating the tactics and strategies of his superior officers fighting on the Western Front, Lawrence learned how to use the unique strengths of his Arab allies in a prolonged guerrilla campaign. With camel raiding parties swiftly traversing the dunes, he hoped to strike at the enemy hard and fast before suddenly retreating back into the remote wilderness. Lawrence’s command of the desert would secure victory for Britain and her allies like Admiral Horatio Nelson’s control of the sea secured victory at the Nile and Trafalgar.
Lawrence’s biographer had his own experiences learning the difference between his Western conception of freedom and the realities of war. At one point, Fiennes recounts his revulsion at discovering that the Sultan of Oman lived in palatial splendor while his people suffered incredible poverty. Fiennes resolved to resign and abandon the mission, until his Arab staff sergeant pleaded with him to reconsider. The Marxists were godless, he said, and had no respect for the religious traditions of the Omanis – they persecuted believers with acts of exceptional cruelty. The Sultanate may not have been an ideal regime by any stretch of the imagination, but the Marxists in Oman were on the frontlines of a global revolution which threatened to engulf the whole world in a far worse tyranny. The only chance everyday Omanis had for a better life would be defeating the Marxist revolution.
A similar ambiguity marked Lawrence’s relationship with the British Empire. Although he proudly fought for his country and believed in the war, he worried that the concerns of his Arab comrades would be lost in the power politics of post-war negotiations. He resolved to do everything in his power to ensure that would not happen. “I vowed to make the Arab Revolt the engine of its own success,” he wrote in Seven Pillars, “and vowed to lead it so madly in the final victory that expediency should counsel to the [Allied] Powers a fair settlement of the Arabs’ moral claims.”
Sadly, Lawrence’s battlefield prowess did not translate to influence at the conferences in Cairo and Paris that decided the Middle East’s fate. As the revolt raged, France and Britain had signed what became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret treaty that gave France control of Syria – the land the Arab allies desperately wanted for an independent kingdom. Despite Lawrence’s best efforts and support of far-seeing statesmen such as Winston Churchill, he was incapable of making his country do the honorable thing and make good on all their promises to the Arabs.
Western powers still struggle with treating Middle Eastern allies with the respect they deserve. As seen in the disastrous 2021 American retreat from Afghanistan, the politicians charged with making the most important strategic decisions would rather prioritize short-term gain and public relations victories than pay the debts of honor that are owed. As Edmund Burke ruefully observed, “the age of chivalry is gone.”
Lawrence stands as a rebuke to this shameful and irresponsible approach to foreign affairs. Great empires, like Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century or America today, bear an immense responsibility for the maintenance of a just world order. Global leadership requires not only a willingness to make difficult decisions and understand complex dynamics, but also to play the part of a hero.