Guerrilla Leader Page 3

  In preparation for his trip while still at Oxford, Lawrence, in his usual fashion, spared no pains in immersing himself in the region. He began by learning to speak Arabic before his departure from Oxford. Although his vocabulary was small—he admitted to one of his biographers of knowing eighty or so words of Arabic—Lawrence possessed a natural knack for learning languages that he had fostered initially while traveling throughout France. During his Middle Eastern sojourn, he stayed with many private families throughout the area and was deeply affected by the simple and sincere hospitality of the local people. On August 15, he wrote to his father from Tripoli: “This is a glorious country for wandering in, for hospitality is something more than a name: setting aside the American and English missionaries, who take care of me in the most fatherly (or motherly) way:—they have all so far been as good as they can be—there are the common people, each one ready to receive one for a night, and allow me to share in their meals: and without a thought of payment from a traveler on foot. It is so pleasant, for they have a very attractive kind of native dignity.” As always, his letters are filled with meticulous details and accounts of everything he encountered, including the people and their culture, as well as his bouts with malaria and a potentially deadly incident with local highwaymen who robbed and nearly murdered him.

  This perceptive acumen went beyond the ability to see the tangible; it permitted him to see the invisible: in the case of the Arabs, their fears, habits, beliefs, customs, and tribal relationships. He saw things as assemblages and systems, not as pieces and parts; not as puzzles and events, but as problems and processes. He saw their social and cultural edges, their patterns and points of leverage. Lawrence began to see the Arab world in a new way and would soon come to believe he could move and bend it to his will: that his Crusader musings were more than an adolescent fantasy.

  LAWRENCE’S EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE at Oxford, which culminated in his “Crusading Castles” thesis, was pivotal and became the firm cornerstone of his leadership. It was Oxford that ultimately produced the leadership fusion of character with competence.

  The “Oxford method” of learning, which predominated around the time of Lawrence’s formal education, comprised the following: First, there was a very close master-apprentice relationship between the university don, who acted as a kind of tutor, and his student. The don tailored the instruction to best suit the educational needs of the individual student. Second, the master-apprentice relation was supported within a strong social network bounded by the various colleges within the university proper. The collegiality reinforced and encouraged dialogue and debate among the dons and students to make learning a way of life. Third, learning resources—libraries, museums, lectures, textbook material, chaired professors—were among the best in the world. In Lawrence’s day they were the best. Fourth, the program of instruction grounded its central tenets of learning in the idea of a liberal education. The carving up of knowledge into discrete territories with inviolable disciplinary boundaries had not yet occurred in Lawrence’s time. All that mattered was excellence in learning and the removal of impediments along the student’s path to knowledge and self-understanding. Finally, it was always recognized that the burden of learning rested with the student: this was taken seriously by the student as his primary moral responsibility while at university. The approach placed a large emphasis on student curiosity and his reliance on the socialization of learning in a university environment, where he was expected to learn as much from his peers as from his mentors.

  During the period of Lawrence’s matriculation at Oxford, a unique climate of inquiry existed. By 1910, it was recognized that the next five years of British history would eclipse the last fifty in terms of the practical demands it would place upon its students. This outlook consequently reinforced the idea that student higher learning would continue to be self-directed, personalized, and, especially, problem oriented. Lawrence’s in-depth study of the Crusader castles is a prime example of what we now understand as “problem-based learning.”

  Very briefly, this approach to education centers around real-world problems, yet the learning is more important than the solution to the problem itself. In Lawrence’s case, the problem he tried to resolve was, on the face of it, purely academic: whether or not the Crusaders brought their design influence with them to the Holy Land or brought the influence back with them to their Western kingdoms. Still, in its resolution the issue had profound practical and real learning implications in its solution, as we have already seen. In his learning, Lawrence had to identify clearly what he needed to know, how to find it out, how to share it with his colleagues in his written thesis, and finally how to apply the new knowledge through the discipline of military history. In the process Lawrence was encouraged to explore learning independently outside the classroom and thus gain a deeper understanding of the material instead of a simple superficial overview. In practice this meant he was able to explore the gaps in his own understanding and discover knowledge that was directly and personally meaningful to him. In this way, understanding becomes a personal construction that is always unique to the individual, not dependent on the context of a given body of curriculum. Here the mentorship of the college don was important because he understood how the learner’s goals, the context of his interests, and his own experience are all woven together to become part of the student’s character.

  The chief premise of problem-centered learning resides with the motivational aspect of education in its recognition that puzzlement is the primary factor that motivates the learner to learn. Obviously, any student with an innate curiosity—a student like Lawrence—would respond very well to this approach, and part of the don’s skill lay with his ability to recognize that curiosity in his students and challenge them with the possibilities of puzzlement.

  Without full intention, places like Oxford created the sort of curious mind that could thrive in the kind of complex environment that would be characteristic of events like the Arab Revolt: a highly unstructured problem that would instill a sense of motivation, a feeling of satisfaction, and a personal sense of ownership in the solution that was also unconfined by conceptual bias and intellectual boundary.

  WHEN IT CAME time for Lawrence to serve his internship or—better—clinic in leadership, two things are striking: He likely never realized it was an apprenticeship as such; nor did he serve his basic course in leading with a military unit. Instead, he spent over three years on an archaeological dig at the ancient Hittite city of Carchemish, located in a region of modern south central Turkey. After his graduation from Oxford in June 1910, Lawrence made three more trips to France, this time working for the famous Ashmolean Museum in Oxford under David Hogarth, one of his mentors. Hogarth was able to obtain a four-year traveling scholarship for Lawrence through Magdalen College. Lawrence wrote: “Mr. Hogarth is going digging: and I am going out to Syria in a fortnight to make plain the valleys and level the mountains for his feet:—also to learn Arabic. The two occupations fit into one another splendidly.” He arrived in Beirut just before Christmas 1910 and left for Jebail to begin an intensive two-month study of Arabic under the keen tutelage of Miss Fareedah el Akle.

  Sixty years later, Lawrence’s perceptive Arabic teacher could still recount specific details and impressions of the period and offer direct insight into his qualities as a leader. One of the most important is mental strength sustained by a deep spiritual source. She wrote of Lawrence that he “did not speak of religion much, but he lived a religious life. He was a man of the spirit and lived rather in the spirit than in the body.… Once, talking to Lawrence about an important matter, I asked him a question and he said, ‘Help comes from within, not from without.’ This seemed to me to reveal the secret of his inner life. He seemed to be a man guided by a dynamic power in him: the power of the spirit.” A century earlier, the great Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz had written emphatically: “If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle [in battle] with the unfor
eseen, two qualities are indispensible: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.”

  After completing language studies and a tour of the region, Lawrence arrived at the dig site in early 1911. He immediately began to immerse himself in his new world, where his main responsibility was to “direct the men” in their digging. But his work also included technical responsibilities like the drawing of sculptures, the recording of inscriptions and photography, and any catchall “other duties as assigned.” The digging was extremely arduous and often entailed the movement of tons of rock and stone by rope and brute force using teams of sixty men straining and pulling in the Mesopotamian heat. By night, Lawrence’s time was “filled up with odd jobs that might have been done in the day, squeezing and copying inscriptions, writing up pottery and object lists, journals, etc. Also it gets colder after sunset, and we go to bed early (about 10 or 11 as a rule), to avoid it.”

  The digging season ended four months later in July, when Lawrence began a thirty-day tramp through the Euphrates area on foot to study the local castles and seek further Hittite artifacts. Along the way he contracted dysentery and suffered more attacks of malaria. Still feeling ill, he returned to Great Britain in August. Resumption of the digging season the following spring of 1912 was delayed owing to legal squabbles over railroad rights and ownership of the archaeological site. These issues were finally resolved on March 17.

  By now, the famous archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley had arrived to take charge of the operation. With Woolley on site, many visitors took note and began periodic visits to the location. One of these was the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, Winifred Fontana. She had met with Lawrence the previous year and upon her return noticed a visible change in him. He had sloughed off “much of his absorbed and discomforting aloofness with his visiting clothes and clad in shorts and a button less shirt held together with a gaudy Kurdish belt, looked what he was: a young man of rare power.…”

  As time passed by, Lawrence became more competent with his Arabic, and as he became more competent his confidence grew and prompted him to take a more active role in the social relations among the diggers, as they recognized his personal concern for them as well as his easy style in handling their problems. In consequence he became a popular feature on the local landscape. A typical example of this aspect of Lawrence’s leadership occurred in June: “Today I cured a man of compound scorpion-bite by a few drops of ammonia: for that I have a fame above Thompson’s as hakim [doctor] and as a magician who can conjure devils into water.…” His role as camp physician would be put to good use, for in June 1912 a severe outbreak of cholera struck the Aleppo area and saw Lawrence helping the local population deal with the problem through the remainder of the summer. More language training ensued in August back at Jebail. In September, work at Carchemish was interrupted by the encroaching Baghdad railway then being built by German engineers. After six weeks of leave in England, Lawrence returned in January 1913 for another campaign of digging.

  The excavations that began in earnest in March were to be the most successful during Lawrence’s participation. By the end of the year, Lawrence had gained the reputation and authority among the Arabs equal to that of a local judge and elder: “He became thoroughly conversant with the intricacies of their tribal and family jealousies, rivalries and taboos, their loves and hates, and their strengths and weaknesses. It was this carefully garnered knowledge, together with his remarkable ability to identify with the feelings and personal priorities of individual Arabs, to know the emotions and concerns upon which their self-esteem, security, power and prestige were based, that enabled Lawrence to win the confidence and acceptance of the Arab people.…” For Lawrence, the experience among the Arabs was just another schoolhouse, another kind of learning that had to be mastered, and quite simply it was his innate curiosity that made him a natural and expert learner.

  A close friend of Lawrence’s at the time, Ernest Altounyan, understood his quality as a master learner. He wrote: “Students of his life cannot but be impressed by his persistence as a learner. Nothing could master him, but he proved a brilliant pupil in each successive school; until once more driven to tyranny by his unique sense of proportion. This quality has seldom met with due regard in human history.” Years later Lawrence would admit to Altounyan, “I haven’t had much kick out of life; those days at Carchemish were the best.”

  The final lesson of Lawrence’s prewar education began in January 1914, when he and Woolley were assigned to conduct a geographic survey of the area of Wadi ‘Araba from the port of Aqaba to the ancient city of Petra and the eastern Sinai in the region known in the Bible as the Wilderness of Zin. The survey was sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund and had a purpose serving strategic intelligence; the geographic intent became the “cover” to conceal its political and military aim. The strategic object was to map the entire region because of its political location on the border between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. After completing the project, Lawrence returned briefly to the dig, which he closed out in June, and then he made his last peacetime journey home to England.

  BY THE END of his apprenticeship among the Arabs, Lawrence had developed all the requisite leadership skills needed to lead a people’s revolution. Lawrence also saw that a leader must provide purpose and direction, as well as motivation, to his troops. Such leadership, that of an insurgency, demanded a rare kind of leader with a vision and special imagination, a dreamer: “All men dream: but not equally,” he wrote. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation … to build an inspired dream-palace of [Arab] national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events.…”

  By his will and leadership, Lawrence seized the Arab Revolt like an archer grasping his bow: Arabs like Auda abu Tayi were his arrows; Feisal was the quiver. With great physical and intellectual strength, Lawrence flung the shafts of insurgency across the desert toward Aqaba, Damascus, and beyond. This is his story; it begins with the world on the terrible brink of its first great war.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pale Rider

  Certain men … come to be accepted guardians and transmitters—instructors—of established doctrines. To question the beliefs is to question their authority; to accept the beliefs is evidence of loyalty to the powers that be, a proof of good citizenship. Passivity, docility, acquiescence, come to be primal intellectual virtues. Facts and events presenting novelty and variety are slighted, or are sheared down till they fit the Procrustean bed of habitual belief. Inquiry and doubt are silenced by citation of ancient laws.… This attitude of mind generates dislike of change, and the resulting aversion to novelty is fatal to progress. What will not fit into the established canons is outlawed; men who make new discoveries are objects of suspicion and even of persecution.

  —JOHN DEWEY, How We Think

  When Lawrence returned to the Middle East and to Cairo in December 1914, World War I was already four months old. Though the shooting had begun in August, the seeds of regional discord had been sown much earlier. As the Ottoman Empire entered the nineteenth century, the Arabs of the region were united by a common tongue and a common religion. One would have imagined a strong nationalist sense to emerge as was developing throughout much of Europe. Instead, most Arabs sided with the long-suffering Turks and began to fear the encroaching European Christians more than their befuddled imperial masters, especially after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. This sense of uneasy solidarity was suddenly called into question in July 1908 when a group of radicals calling themselves the Young Turks seized control of the Turkish government. Like many of the disenchanted Arabs, the Young Turks sought
relief from the yoke of imperial repression. They had grown up among Turkish expatriates in Europe, where ideas of revolution carefully stoked their radical thoughts of reform. When they came to power in Istanbul through a bloodless coup, the people received them with hope and joy.

  Through their political arm, the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks sought to implement a secular worldview and rabid nationalism called Pan-Turanism. The latter view, exploiting Turkic roots among the Tartars, attempted to elevate the heathen conqueror Genghis Khan; Batu Khan, his grandson; and others to the position of Turkish forefathers. The secularization program was essentially anti-Arab and even anti-Muslim in its effort to translate the Koran into Turkish and to nationalize Arab schools. A backlash led to the establishment of various Arab nationalist secret societies and to a general movement of passive resistance throughout the Ottoman Empire. On April 13, 1909, a counterrevolution erupted led by disgruntled army officers and Islamic religious students. The countercoup soon slopped over into a full-blown genocide against the largely Christian Armenians in the Turkish province of Adana, where the military generally watched idly by, and even participated, as the reactionaries wasted the region. Believing the Armenians to be supporters of the Young Turks, the rabble killed up to thirty thousand of them. Meanwhile, the massacre in Adana was not lost upon the Arabs. The possibility of violent retribution against a non-Turkic ethnic group and the encroachment of a seemingly Christianizing Europe kept even the most virulent Arab nationalists loyal to the empire.