Winston Churchill on T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia: “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.”
Indeed, Lawrence seems to have been a extraordinary man and military leader. This book by the best-selling author of espionage novels and thrillers, Alistair MacLean, portrays Lawrence as almost superhuman. In the course of his adventures through the Arabian desert over the course of the four years of World War I, Lawrence is shot, beaten, tortured, injured by shrapnel, starved, dehydrated, burned, frozen, sun struck, and ill—all several times and in many places. He survives sleepless nights, days without food and with very little water, capture by the enemy, and journeys of hundreds of miles through the desert on a camel, all for the sake of helping his friends, the Bedouin Arabs, to realize the dream of throwing off the rule of the Turkish Empire and forming a free and unified Arab nation.
The book was filled with details of military strategy and maneuvers, and the numerous battles and explosions and other acts of sabotage and war blurred together in my mind into a conglomeration of violent desert warfare. I would have liked to have learned more about the man, T.E. Lawrence, and less about the battles he fought. The politics of the Middle East before and during World War I were also complicated and sometimes a bit cloudy in my mind, but I was more interested in the political battles than I was the actual battles.
So, as I reached the end of the book, I realized that it was a good introduction to the era of the Turkish Empire, the British assault on that empire, the Great Arab Revolt, World War I in the Middle East, and Lawrence of Arabia. But it was just an introduction to all of these topics, and I was left with many questions. What were the British doing in Arabia in the first place? Did they come there just to fight the Turks? What made Lawrence care so much about the Arabs and Arab independence? Were there really enough Jews in Palestine during and immediately after World War I to make it a battleground between Jews and Arabs? How did Lawrence survive all that he did? We know what Churchill thought about Lawrence. What did Lawrence think of Churchill? Lawrence was a secretive man. He never married. What happened to him after 1920 (when the book ends)? Why was he so secretive? What did he care about other than war and Arab independence?
As I said, a good introduction, after all it’s a Landmark book written for children and young adults, but I would like to know more. I may try a biography written for adults, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson.