Robert Graves

“ The Beni Sakhr hospitality was even richer than that of the Howeitat. Lawrence, Ali and the rest ate ravenously, for good manners, at mutton and rice which was soused in so much liquid butter that they splashed their clothes and greased their faces in their first polite haste. The pace was slackening somewhat, though the meal was far from its end, when Abd el Kader grunted, rose to his feet, wiped his hands on a handkerchief and sat back on the carpets by the tent wall. Lawrence and the rest did not know whether to rise too, for the custom was for all to rise together. ”

“ A habit of mind caught from the desert: though perhaps latent in his blood, of which the Spanish strain—and Spanish is half-Arab—shows in the severity of his jaw and the cruel flash of his rare and quickly appeased anger. And yet with all his love of failure Lawrence has been queerly dogged with success. As Miss Gertrude Bell said of him once, ‘Everything that he touches flowers.’ His forlorn hopes all come off, he casts his bread magnificently upon the waters and is peevish to find it again (much swollen) after many days. The more deeply he abases himself the higher he finds himself exalted. ”

“ When no Turks were about, the peasants had spoken in whispers the famous names of its leaders—Tallal, Nasir. Nuri, Auda, ‘Aurans’; whom now they saw in the flesh.
Lawrence and five or six others went up a hill for a look south to see if anything was moving. To their astonishment a company of regulars in uniform—Turks, Austrians, Germans—was coming slowly towards them with eight machine-guns mounted on pack-animals. They were marching up from Galilee towards Damascus after their defeat by Allenby, thinking themselves fifty miles from any war. ”

“ For myself, I have been so violently uprooted, and plunged so deeply into a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal. I have dropped everything I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity, snatching chances of the moment when and where I see them. My people have probably told you that the job is to foment an Arab rebellion against Turkey, and for that I have to try to hide my Frankish exterior, and be as little out of the Arab picture as I can. ”

“ A few of the enemy got away, the gunners on their mules and a few mounted men and officers. There were only a hundred and sixty prisoners taken, many of them wounded, for the Howeitat were avenging yesterday’s murder of their women and children. Three hundred dead and dying were scattered in the valley. Auda came up on foot, his eyes mad with delight of battle, and the words bubbling incoherently from his mouth: ‘Work, work, where are words? Work, bullets, Abu Tayi ...’ and he held up his shattered field-glasses, his pierced pistol-holster, and his leather sword-scabbard cut to ribbons. ”

“ Long practice has made Lawrence able to talk for twenty minutes at a time to whoever accosts him without betraying that he hasn’t a notion who the person is. Yet he can remember names and details of taste and character, and words and opinions and places vividly and at great length. He does his best to see people; but is constantly getting into trouble for not recognizing and saluting officers when they are out of uniform; for nobody is willing to believe his excuses. ”

“ Again, the conflict is between the fanatic who is always either on the crest or in the trough of his emotions, who loves and hates violently, and the over-civilized man whose chief aim in life is to keep an equal mind even if he undoes himself by the very wideness of his sympathies. These two selves are mutually destructive, so Lawrence has finally fallen between them into a nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false god in which to believe. ”

“ The massacre sent a shock of incredulous horror across Arabia. The first rule of Arab war was that women and children too young to fight must be spared and that property which could not be carried off in fair raiding should be left undamaged. Feisal’s men realized what Feisal knew already, that the Turks would stick at nothing, and they fell back to consider what must now be done. They were in honour bound, because of the massacre, to fight to the last man; and yet their arms were plainly worth nothing against modern Turkish (and German) rifles and machine-guns and artillery. ”

“ Circumstances and his own lifelong efforts have made him more free of human ties than other men. He can therefore dispose of himself in any market at any given time. Others cannot; they have careers, ambitions, families, wants, hopes, fears, traditions, duties—all binding them to that organized human society in which Lawrence seems to play only an accidental and perfunctory part. It is this extraordinary detachment, this final insulation of himself, which makes him the object of so much curiosity, suspicion, exasperation, admiration, love, hatred, jealousy, legends, lies. ”

“ The Arabs rebelled against the Turks during the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad, but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of their own.
Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitans have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater than the profit. ”

“ Lawrence did nothing of the sort, though he had popularity and power enough perhaps to make himself Emperor even without an official change of faith. But it would have been foolish to expect a man who has qualities that shine in difficult weather to subdue them in calm weather. He came away and left the Arabs to employ the freedom that he had given them, a freedom unencumbered by his rule which, however just and wise, would always have been an alien rule. He would have contradicted himself had he suffered all those pains to free the Arabs and then enslaved them under himself. ”

“ An old grey-bearded ragged man suddenly appeared, with a face of great power and weariness, and sat down upon Lawrence’s clothes, not seeming to notice them or him. At last he spoke and said: ‘The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.’ It was the strangest thing that Lawrence had ever heard in Arabia. The connection of God with Love was an idea quite foreign to the country. God was Justice, or God was Power or Fear, but never Love. Christianity was not a wholly Semitic creed, but a grafting of Greek idealism upon the hard Law of Moses, the typical Semite. ”

“ An affected lack of ease in society, an affected self-withdrawal, an inclined carriage of the head, a deliberate economy of gesture and vocabulary, a peculiar dragging of the words yes and no, a lack of emphasis at the moments of arrival and departure—whenever I meet these, I know that the Lawrence legend is stalking about, a ghost as persuasive, as destructive, as false as the Byron legends of a hundred years ago. ”

“ Men, women and children in a frenzy fought like dogs over every object; even doors and windows, door-frames and window-frames, steps of the stairs, were carried off. Others smashed and looted the wagons in the siding. Lawrence and Young cut the telegraph, the Palestine army’s main link with home. They cut it slowly to draw out the indignation of the German-Turkish staff at Nazareth. The Turks’ hopeless lack of initiative made their army a directed one, so that by destroying the telegraph Lawrence went far towards turning them into a leaderless mob. ”

“ For the first time in the war Lawrence gave the order: ‘No prisoners.’ The peasants flocked to join in the attack. At first only one man in six had a weapon, but gradually they armed themselves from the fallen Turks until at nightfall every man had a rifle and a captured horse.
Just one group of Arabs who had not heard of the horror of Tafas took prisoners the last two hundred men. Lawrence went up to inquire why their lives had been spared, not unwilling to leave them alive as witnesses of Tallal’s price. ”

“ Our job is the conquest of the air, our element. That’s a more than large enough effort to comprehend all our intelligence. We grudge every routine duty, such as are invented for soldiers to keep them out of mischief, and [426] perform our parades deliberately ill, lest we lose our edges and become degraded into parts of a machine. In the Army the men belong to the machine. In the R.A.F. the machines, upon earth, belong to the men; as in the air they belong to the officers. So the men have the more of them. Drill in the Air Force is punitive, in the eyes of men and officers alike. ”

“ Among the captures were two lorries crammed with delicacies for some German canteen. Nuri Said found an Arab prising open a tin of bottled asparagus and cried out: ‘Pigs’ bones!’ The peasant spat in horror and threw them down. Nuri Said picked them up and later shared them with Lawrence, Joyce and Young. The trucks were splashed with petrol and set on fire and the blaze that evening acted as a beacon for hundreds and hundreds of Arab peasant rebels who came on camel, on horse, on foot, in great enthusiasm, hoping that this was the final release of their country. ”

“ The midday halt brought an alarm. Men on horses and camels were seen riding up from the north and west and closing in on the party. Rifles were snatched up and the Indians ran to their machine-guns. In thirty seconds the defence was ready; Ali ibn el Hussein cried out, ‘Hold the fire until they come close.’ Then one of Lawrence’s body-guard, belonging to a despised clan of serfs, the Sherarat, but a devoted servant and brave fighter, sprang up laughing and waved his sleeve in the air as a signal of friendship. ”

“ Actual fighting, as opposed to pin-pricking raids and demolitions, was a luxury that he indulged the Arabs in merely to save their self-respect. They could not have thought freedom honourably won without it. The capture of Akaba is a clear instance of an operation that, though it affected the more conventional war at Gaza and Beersheba, had in itself serious political rather than serious military significance. It was only by an accident that the Turkish battalion happened to bar the way at Aba el Lissan and invite destruction. ”

“ Lawrence has a right to be Lawrence; he is his own peculiar invention. But at second and third hand he is occasionally comic, as when some ambitious, conventional, sporting, self-indulgent lion tries on his unicorn skin. But more often it goes beyond the comic stage: strong silent little men are even more insufferable than strong silent big ones. ”

“ The baggage-camels went slowly, weak with the mange that was the curse of Wejh, grazing all the way. The riders were tempted to hurry them but Auda said no; because of the long ride before them they must go slowly and spare their beasts. This was a country of white sand which dazzled the eyes cruelly, and they were glad when they came to a small oasis in a valley where an old man, his wife and daughters, the only inhabitants, had a garden among the palm-trees. They grew tobacco, beans, melons, cucumbers, egg-plants, and worked day and night without much thought of the world outside. ”

“ Again, in a hut in the Air Force a comrade once asked him, ‘Excuse me, Shaw, but what does “iconoclast” mean?’—he acted as a handy cross-word dictionary—and then Lawrence outlined a brief history of the religious politics in fifth-century Constantinople which first gave rise to the word. But this is merely a good-humoured joke on himself: he despises mere knowledge, though he accumulates it and stores it carefully from old habit. He despises it because it is imperfect, because he sees knowledge as the opposite of wisdom. He never bluffs ”

“ He has resolutely and painfully adopted the attitude towards organized society, ‘you go your way and I’ll go mine,’ ‘leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone,’ but organized society cannot control itself in its hue-and-cry after a lost lamb that is perversely in need of no crook or fold. It is perhaps the triumph of his detachment that one can write of him in this way, as if he were a character in ancient history, confident that whatever one writes will not affect the man himself in the least, that his check will be only on infringements of copyrights that are no longer entirely his own. ”