Guerrilla Leader Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by James J. Schneider

  Foreword copyright © 2011 by Thomas E. Ricks

  Map copyright © 2011 by David Lindroth, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schneider, James J. (James Joseph).

  Guerrilla leader : T. E. Lawrence and the Arab revolt / James J. Schneider; foreword by Tom Ricks.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53020-2

  1. Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1888–1935—Military leadership. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Middle East. 3. Arab countries—History—Arab Revolt, 1916–1918. 4. Command of troops—History—20th century. I. Title.

  D568.4.L45S34 2011

  940.4′15092—dc22 2010054141

  Title-page image copyright © iStockphoto.com / © pop_jop

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design: Belina Huey

  Jacket photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  v3.1

  I had believed these misfortunes of the Revolt to be due mainly to faulty leaders, or rather to lack of leadership, Arab and English. So I went down to Arabia to see and consider its great men.

  —T. E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map

  “Speaking for the Dead”

  Foreword

  Preface

  Bibliographic Note

  Dramatis Personae

  1. Arrival

  2. Pale Rider

  3. A Flash of Genius

  4. Aqaba!

  5. Lawrence in LEGO-land

  6. To Whom the Gods Pray

  7. The Grief of Leaders

  8. Thief of Souls

  9. The Hovering Dead

  10. Days of Wrath; O Days of Sorrow—the Road to Damascus

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Speaking for the Dead

  This Work Is Respectfully Dedicated to the:

  SOLDIERS

  Look: toward the west … toward the west … to the land of Cochin,

  Where, through endless clouds of rust-hued dust we plod.

  Down eternal, emerald, jungled halls we slogged.

  Toward the blazing maelstrom … into the crucible … we trod;

  Not to victory,

  But to our destiny.

  Unseen, unheard, unremembered strong-armed men—

  from un-named, far-off, time-less battle-fields—stood nigh

  As we marched by.

  In burnished, bronze bucklers, in helms of nodding horse-hair plumes,

  In khaki-colored shirts, in strange black iron tombs;

  Yet from their brilliant, incandescent visage a curious,

  Caring glance was cast

  As we marched past.

  Then just ahead … the sky was red:

  Burning, cloying, smoking, hell-evoking

  Where in the dusky shadows lurked the demons of despair,

  At our hearts and minds they tear.

  Inexorably, towards the fiery forge we storm to find:

  That final terror, death’s dark fear,

  Now in its grip, our souls to sear.

  Our years of youth, like timeless tracks of tears are shed

  Until all hope is gone, is dead.

  • • •

  Like the hammer of Hephaestus, the shot and shell explode.

  Amidst the screaming anguish, our minds corrode.

  Like stentoric bellows, the cannons roar

  And searing sparks, like tracers soar.

  A brief glimpse, a yellow face appears: once our enemy

  Now, like us, a victim of his destiny.

  As though mere ashes, our naked souls are strewn.

  Placed upon battle’s anvil, new men are hewn.

  Blow upon blow, war’s hammer forges the metal of our soul.

  The metal, some base as brass, but only iron the battle-test can pass.

  Only iron—the essence, the virtue of our souls, our selves—can last.

  At last, fire-quenched, our steeled soul is tempered true,

  Through … and … through.

  Metamorphosed, quantum-like, life and death seemed one.

  And now it looked as if a vision did appear:

  The Christ and His squad of twelve drew near.

  Upon his face was sadness filled.

  Yet, bringing quietude, the battle stilled.

  His voice, soft as the air itself, we strained to hear.

  But what he said at once was clear:

  “Man! You are born to war.

  Your birth-cry is your battle-cry;

  Avenging all, defending nothing.

  The flame of hate burns within.

  It fascinates … entices to destroy.

  Into the streets like blood it spills; its evil armies to deploy.

  Throughout your cities, through the land

  Hate makes its final, murd’rous stand.

  Brilliant, ingenious, the conquered stars are yours,

  But unconquered still is your fear to love.

  I say to you: You will be left on Megiddo’s field,

  unburied to rot—your fate,

  To putrefy in your shroud of hate.

  Hell’s maggots will carve out, in your stinking carcass, epitaphs

  Unless from this place you can return; from these smoking depths

  To sunny reaches up above, bearing simple human love.”

  A fleeting smile across His face came now,

  To chase away the clouds of sorrow upon his brow.

  Then with a final glance, the Prince of Peace was gone;

  And the Light of Love went out.

  Then the din of hell returned in fury,

  Trying all the while our souls to bury.

  Vulcan now our tempered souls did take,

  Like links to forge; a chain to make:

  In self-sacrifice and comradeship, love’s bond was made.

  A band of love and Man that could not break.

  At last …

  At last … the paradox resolved.

  Of all the hate, we were absolved.

  Out of this hopeless abyss we came,

  Bearing the sacred mem’ry of comrades once beloved,

  Friend and foe, whose lives like a fragile flame, were quenched.

  After a year, to our homes we went

  To be met—not by pomp—but stony stares and icy gazes:

  Our hearts were rent.

  Since then, a secret, smoldering silence we have kept.

  For men, strong-armed, cannot of love bespeak

  For fear that others would think us weak;

  Nor of the sight and sound of broken minds and limbs,

  of shattered dreams

  And sleepless nights, of broken lives and broken hearts—

  Of comrades once held dear;

  Nor of the hate, still its ugly head does rear.

  With unseen, unheard, unremembered strong-armed men—

  From un-named, far-off, time-less, battle-fields—we stand nigh

  As the thankless shuffle by.

  In burnished, bronze bucklers, in helms of nodding horse-hair plumes;

  In mottled, emerald casques, in khaki-colored shirts,

  In strange black iron tombs;

  And from our brilliant, incandescent visage
a curious caring

  glance is cast,

  As the unseeing, unknowing to their fate walk past.

  Lonely sentinels, shoulder-to-shoulder, shield-to-shield,

  our ranks stand fast.

  In a timeless cry, a sacred pledge, our muted voices shout:

  “Seize this day; let the Prince will out.

  End this hate; within your hearts, quiet war.

  And give us rest … eternal rest … fill these ranks no more!”

  JJS

  FIRST INFANTRY DIVISION

  VIETNAM, 1966–67

  Foreword

  THOMAS E. RICKS

  In this provocative book, James Schneider gives us a refreshing new look at T. E. Lawrence, one of the most interesting and romantic figures of the twentieth century. The Lawrence that Schneider gives us is not the familiar one we think we know, the person that has previously been presented. Here he is examined as a military leader and innovator. We see him first as a smart newcomer, then as a small-unit tactical leader, and finally, in the last phase of World War I in the desert, as an operational commander overseeing subordinate efforts.

  Schneider argues—persuasively, I think—that Lawrence’s greatest achievement was an intellectual act: “Lawrence was the first theorist and practitioner to revolutionize the guerrilla within the broader context of modern industrialized warfare.” He was able to discard the dominant military paradigm of his day and forge a new one that combined age-old raiding techniques with industrial-era weaponry and targets. That dominant paradigm, which focuses on the destruction of the enemy, is still with us today, and is a major reason that the United States military has had such a difficult time in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was only several years into those wars that our senior leaders began to consider the possibility that killing the enemy was not perhaps always the best answer, or even the default mode of warfare.

  Lawrence’s great insight early in his time with the Arab tribesman in the north Arabian desert was that victory did not lie in the physical destruction of his foe. “A dead Turk was a man who could no longer eat and remain a logistical burden,” Schneider writes. “A dead Turk was a man who could no longer fear and spread the virus of terror among his living comrades: Lawrence wanted a living demoralized mob, not an army of dead heroes.” And even though his forces incessantly attacked the Hejaz railway, he sought only to squeeze that key Turkish line of supply, not to destroy it. As Lawrence put it, “Our goal must be to keep the railroad working, but just barely while inflicting maximum loss and discomfort on the Turks.” He was imposing costs on the enemy, tying up his troops, bleeding him rather than decapitating him.

  Schneider also shows us that in another departure that remains heresy in Western militaries even today, Lawrence put the men before the mission. That is, he would rather fail in the mission than lose his fighters.

  In depicting how Lawrence took that mental leap away from the dominant Western paradigm of annihilation, Schneider insightfully takes us deep into the man’s personality and quirks, looking at how his rare, even unique, qualities, enabled his achievement but likely also made him vulnerable to mental collapse at his moment of triumph. Leading men in combat is an extraordinarily stressful task. How, Schneider asks, was it possible for this introverted, otherworldly Englishman to help spur a revolt in a foreign land, to lead bands of warriors alien to his culture? Moreover, how did he manage to adapt nineteenth-century guerrilla warfare to the twentieth century, discovering how to carry it out in the industrial age?

  Like many good military leaders, Lawrence had an ability to grasp quickly the heart of the matter, the essential element. And like the best strategists, Schneider notes, Lawrence was a “master learner,” endlessly curious and reflective to a fault. Also, his background in military intelligence gave him an advantage in prosecuting a campaign of irregular warfare, in which information usually is more important then action.

  But most of all, Schneider shows us that it was Lawrence’s extraordinary empathy that enabled his achievements. This ability to identify with others, to grasp their hopes and fears and understanding of events about them, was key in the sort of campaign he conducted. “In an insurgency, empathy plays an especially crucial role,” Schneider writes. “It places the leader inside the hearts and minds of his own men.” In an interesting aside, Schneider also observes that it enabled Lawrence to understand his superior, General Edmund Allenby. This question of understanding the thoughts of a superior is a little-studied area of military command, but it is especially important when, as with Lawrence, one’s own commander is distant and difficult to reach, and the barest strategic intent is all that one has to go by.

  It was because of these qualities that Lawrence came to understand and use the centrality of narrative to Arabic culture, studying the stories that each tribe told about itself. I would argue that narrative is just as important in our culture, and that Western militaries have been slow to grapple with its use. Indeed, the United States Army seems almost to pride itself perversely on having inarticulate leaders who present themselves as “muddy boot sojers.”

  Yet because of all these qualities, Schneider shows us, Lawrence also was extremely vulnerable to traumatic stress. Months of combat, several woundings, and the loss of close comrades wore the man down. Invoking the work of the pathbreaking psychiatrist and veterans counselor Jonathan Shay, he illustrates how the betrayal of the Arab cause of independence by the British and French, who had colonial designs on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, also undercut Lawrence’s stability and eroded his character. Near the end of the war, outside the village of Tafas, Lawrence for the first time personally gave the order, “Take no prisoners.” Schneider says that, “At that instant, … Lawrence stopped being a leader, his moral compass gone.” By age thirty-one, Lawrence had made his great achievements, but psychologically was a dead man walking. The remaining seventeen years of his life were only a slow unraveling.

  Preface

  This [leadership] at bottom is the wish and prayer of all human hearts, everywhere and at all times: “Give me a leader, not a false sham-leader; a true leader, that he may guide me on the true way.”

  —THOMAS CARLYLE, Chartism, 1839

  In the nineteenth century, a noted fellow soldier and countryman of T. E. Lawrence, Sir William Francis Butler, wrote: “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.” Butler’s quote stands to emphasize the importance of the intimate and dynamic connection between learning and leading and serves as the leader’s most important antidote to the consequences of interminable war. We have learned the hard lesson from Vietnam that education is an important inoculation against post-traumatic stress disorder. Hard learning strengthens the mind to resist the shock and trauma of combat.

  The influence of Lawrence on military leadership of the last century and into the present one has been largely ignored, forgotten, or misunderstood. His literary and intellectual influence on Western thinking in general, however, has been more broad and profound, especially in the twentieth century. His writing, most significantly Seven Pillars of Wisdom, though often overwrought, obscure, and self-serving, is always gripping, powerful, and poetic. To the extent that Lawrence had any kind of impression among the military—any military—it was when he resonated with a particular kind of rare officer: the military intellectual who saw Seven Pillars of Wisdom and other writings as a psychological and intellectual window into the mind of a desert warrior and guerrilla leader.

  For the average reader, the brush with Lawrence was perhaps through David Lean’s motion picture Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole. The movie captured the essence, though not the whole truth, of Lawrence’s desert epic and offers some grainy insight into the role of Lawrence as a leader of the Arab Revolt. Though many might argue that leaders are made, not born, Lawrence’s case suggests a delicate balance between nature and nurture in
the development of any great leader.

  Leadership is perhaps the most important human imperative: without leaders—without purpose, direction, and motivation—society as we know it could not function. Leadership is a fundamental birthright that at one time or another we are all called upon to exercise, whether as leader or follower. Yet in both roles, personal character and professional competence are demanded. The actual expression of the two is always defined by the unique social and historical circumstances of the striving group.

  In modern war, it becomes axiomatic that the greatest demoralizing force—next to the shock and loss of comrades in battle—is the unschooled, intellectually incompetent leader. The glassy-eyed gaze of terror and incomprehension on the face of a combat leader is an expression that haunts surviving soldiers to their graves. Increasingly, as modern war continues its swift evolution into the twenty-first century, soldiers will look to their leaders not only for hard answers, but also for a whole array of real-world solutions, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or some other dimly imagined battlefield of the future.

  The Middle East is the center of gravity of the twenty-first century: commotion and upheaval in that region move the rest of the world along with it. For good or ill, this influence will continue for the next hundred years. The recent rise of the Middle East in world history began with World War I, and one of the key players in that ascension was Lawrence. This book examines Lawrence’s crucial role in the early transformation of the Middle East while leading an Arab revolt against the Turkish Empire.

  Bibliographic Note

  Although the book is based on extensive research in primary and secondary sources, I have dispensed with the normal scholarly apparatus of lengthy footnotes, disputations, tables, and the like for the sake of readability. Lawrence’s journey to the pinnacles of leadership is an intensely personal narrative that should be read as a seamless story insofar as is practicable. This has been my chief objective as a matter of writing style. The only exception concerns Lawrence’s own words, in which case I have provided footnotes to the appropriate sources. Readers interested in more bibliographic details are invited to consult the extensive bibliographies found in Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Atheneum, 1990), and Michael Korda, Hero (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).