Lawrence of Arabia
The British officer and archaeologist who helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and became the legend called Lawrence of Arabia.
He was a small, bookish Oxford archaeologist who became one of the twentieth century's great romantic legends, and he never quite forgave himself for the cause he served. T.E. Lawrence, remembered as Lawrence of Arabia, was a British intelligence officer who helped turn a scattered Arab uprising into a real military threat to the Ottoman Empire, all while carrying a secret that made his own promises a lie.
The desert war
Lawrence knew the region before the war, having dug at ancient sites in Syria and picked up Arabic along the way. When the Ottomans joined the Central Powers, that expertise made him useful to British intelligence in Cairo. In 1916 the Sharif of Mecca launched the Arab Revolt, and Lawrence was sent as a liaison to one of its leaders, Emir Faisal. In Faisal he found the figurehead he was looking for, and he threw himself into the fighting. The war he waged was not one of fixed lines. It was hit and run: columns of camel-mounted tribesmen striking Ottoman garrisons and, above all, dynamiting the Hejaz Railway, the single-track lifeline that ran from Damascus down to Medina. His masterstroke came in July 1917, when he led a force across a desert the Turks thought impassable to seize the Red Sea port of Aqaba from its undefended landward side. It made his name and gave the revolt a supply base on the coast.
The lie he carried
Lawrence urged the Arabs on with the promise of independence, and he seems to have believed in it. But he also knew what they did not. In 1916 Britain and France had secretly agreed, in the Sykes-Picot deal, to divide the Ottoman Middle East into their own zones of control once the war was won. He was fighting for Arab freedom while helping to hand Arab lands to European empires. Britain was at the same time making a separate promise about Palestine in the Balfour Declaration, so that by 1917 it had promised the same territory twice over. The contradiction gnawed at Lawrence for the rest of his life. When the postwar settlement carved up the region much as Sykes-Picot had sketched, he felt he had led men to fight for a promise he knew to be hollow.
The flight from fame
After the war an American journalist, Lowell Thomas, turned Lawrence into a global celebrity with a touring picture show, and the shy officer came to loathe the legend even as he kept feeding it. He poured his own version into Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a vast, self-dramatizing memoir published in 1926. Then he tried to vanish, enlisting in the ranks of the Royal Air Force under a false name to escape the fame his myth had created. He did not escape for long. In May 1935, riding the powerful motorcycle he loved down a Dorset lane, he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles, was thrown over the handlebars, and died six days later at forty-six. The legend outlived the man, as he had feared it would, and the borders drawn over his broken promise still shape the Middle East today.