Lawrence was at least partly responsible for the creation of present-day Iraq (with all its ethnic and religious contradictions) and Jordan, and he played a substantial role in the creation of Palestine as a separate entity. The British and French division of the immense Turkish empire that extended north and south from Syria to Yemen and east and west from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf—an area from which Lawrence had played a major, and admittedly flamboyant, role in driving out the Turks—was the primary guilt that Lawrence bore, and that explains much of his life from 1922 to his death in 1935.

He was partly instrumental in the creation of not one but threeMiddle Eastern kingdoms. Only one of these, Jordan, survives today in its original form; but much of the map of the Middle East was drawn by Lawrence, quite literally, as we have seen; and if he could not give the Arabs what they most wanted—a “greater Syria"—he at any rate helped to give them the states that now exist there, and, for better or worse, the dream of a larger, united Arab nation, which for a brief time led to the union of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic, and which is still the motivating force behind much of the unrest and violence of Arab nationalism. Lawrence himself foresaw only too clearly what the price would be if the Allies failed to give the Arabs what they wanted—and had been promised—and the long-term consequences of letting the French take Lebanon and Syria as mandates—in effect, colonies—and letting the British take Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. He did his best to persuade a reluctant Feisal to accept the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, but he understood that this acceptance was dependent on the Arabs’ getting a meaningful state, and was unlikely to be achieved in the long run if the Middle East was carved up into small and mutually hostile units, under French or British colonial administration.

As it turned out, the brutal carving up of the Turkish empire was complicated by the fact that the great oil reserves were in the most backward areas, on the eastern fringe of the Middle East. These would have the effect of transforming remote desert “kingdoms” and “principalities” into oil-rich powers, while leaving the more highly developed, better educated, and more populous parts of the area—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon—impoverished. British and French policy (as strongly as each differed from the other) ensured that there would be no unitary Arab state as a major power in which oil revenues might be used to improve the lives of ordinary Arabs, and thwarted just those ambitions which Lawrence had been at such pains to arouse, and which led Lowell Thomas, with his usual touch of hyperbole, to describe Lawrence as “the George Washington of a United States of Arabia.” Alas, after the Peace Conference, and the creation of Jordan and Iraq, Lawrence—knowing that he had done his best for the Arabs and that it was not good enough, and broken by shame and guilt at his own failure—resigned from public life and signed up as an airman, and the United States of Arabia was never born, with consequences that we are still facing today.

There is, therefore, every reason to examine objectively and clearly what Lawrence attempted to do, and to treat him not as an interesting neurotic with profound oedipal problems (though this may be true), but as both a visionary and a warrior; as a man who not only wrote an epic but lived one; and as a politician and diplomat, indeed a maker of nations, whose failure to get the Arabs what they had been promised had profound consequences for the world today, consequences that have not been played out yet, and whose outcome nobody can predict.

Few people have risen so high so quickly, or have voluntarily given up not only honors but power, and done so without regret or bitterness. Fewer still have been so famous and tried so hard to live obscurely. Lawrence found in the end peace of a kind in friendships, in literature, and in an unexpected gift for marine craftsmanship and engineering which has seldom been fully acknowledged, but to which many airmen in World War II would owe their lives.

However many books there have been about Lawrence, his is still a story worth telling, a life that needs to be described without prejudice and without a fixed agenda: a military “triumph,” as he himself called it with a combination of pride, bitterness, and irony; an extraordinary and heroic epic; and a political failure whose importance we can only begin to reckon today as we pick among the ruins of Lawrence’s hopes for the Middle East in search of a way forward.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence himself described his own genius best.

All men dream: but not equally.Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of theirMinds wake in the day to find that it wasvanity; but the dreamers of the day aredangerous men, for they may act their dreamwith open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. * Perhaps the most popular film the author’s Uncle Alex and his father ever made was That Hamilton Woman,starring Laurence olivier as Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady hamilton. Winston Churchill screened it innumerable times (it never failed to move him to tears), and took a print to Moscow as a gift to Stalin. As a result it was the only British film seen during World War ii by Soviet audiences, and extended Nelson’s heroic reputation to russia.

* Leslie howard, whose original name was Leslie howard Steiner, was the son of an english-Jewish mother, Lillian Blumberg, and a hungarian-Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner.

* Although Mack’s book on Lawrence is in many respects fascinating—he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for it in 1977—it suffered retroactively from his subsequent notoriety as a believer in and proselytizer for the personal stories of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and to have returned to tell the tale.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE“Who Is This Extraordinary Pip-Squeak?”

5 “a most excellent dinner”:Lawrence, Letters, Garnett (ed.), 206.

6 “an odd gnome”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia,174.

6 “Who is this extraordinary pip-squeak?”: Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia, 127.

8 “Into friendship with T. E. Lawrence”:Storrs, Orientations, 218.

8 “The first of us was Ronald Storrs”:Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 37.Hereafter abbreviated SP.

9 “revolverpractice on deck”:Storrs, Orientations,200.

9 “quite intolerable to the Staff”:Lawrence, SP, 43.

9 “But when at last we anchored”:Ibid., 47.

10 “Till now we have defended”:Brown and Cave, Touch of Genius, 55.

11 “Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 331.

11 “a holiday and a joy-ride”:Lawrence, SP, 43.

12 “like water, or permeating oil”:Ibid., 37.

13 “incoherent and spasmodic”:Storrs, Orientations, 218.

13 “None of us realized”:Ibid.

14 “a yellow silk kuffiya”:Ibid., 201.

15 “When Abdallah quoted”:Ibid., 221.

15 “was short, strong”:Lawrence, SP, 48, 49.

17 “Meeting today: Wilson”:Storrs, Orientations, 221.

18 “took a great fancy”:Lawrence, SP, 59. 18 “force of character”: Ibid.

18 “prophet”:Ibid., 60.

18 ” staggered”:Ibid., 59.

18 “waving grateful hands”:Storrs, Orientations, 221.

22 Zeid, still a “beardless” young man: Lawrence, SP, 60.

25 “shelters of branches and palm leaves”:Ibid., 64.

26 “two inches thick”:Ibid., 68.

28 “dinner to the examiners to celebrate it”:Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 67.

28 “astonishingly wide”:Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, 75.