Lawrence of Arabia

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LAWRENCE OF ARABIA - By R. H. KIERNAN - INTRODUCTION - IN a letter which I received from Lawrence on the day of his fatal accident, he wrote, Most children are fed up with the war and the inclination among its survivors to treat it as a matter of significance. I sympathize with them the last war is always a bore for the next generation. There is, of course, such a thing as hearing too much about those days in the conversation of ones elders, but it would be difficult to find anyone, young or old, who is not interested in the striking figure of Lawrence and in what he did in the Revolt of the Arabs. It is a tale of desert rides and raids, with battle, murder, and massacre, under molten skies or in bitter, driving gales and snow. Here I have indicated those scenes and also tried to show the man himself, his pair for tactics in the field, his more unusual gift of understanding the strategical results of his successes, the magnetism which drew the Bedouin to him, and the high soul and genius which transcended all these things But the story does not consist merely of thrills. In the maps, only the necessary places are marked which appear in the text, but the reader must study them, note the relation between places-particularly along the Pilgrims Railway from Damascus to Medina-and remember the scale, so that he will be able to estimate the distances between them. Without this the meaning of his marches, feints, and destructive raids cannot be realized. The better the map is known, the more the deadly game played by one of the most magnificent guerilla- leaders in the worlds history will be understood and appreciated. R. H K -- CONTENTS -- IV. THE PALESTINE CAMPAIGN . . V. TRAIN-WRECKING VI. A PITCHED BATTLE . . BY THE DEAD VII. ON TO DAMASCUS VIII. THE BATTLE OF THE PEACE . SEA PAGE v MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS PLATES LIEUT.-COLONEL T. E. LAWRENCE, C.B., D.S.O. These iilustrafions q v be found between pp. 2 8 and 29. MAPS LAWRENCE OF ARABIA CHAPTER I BRITAIN, TURKEY, AND THE ARABS The Trkish Empire-Britain and Russia-Turkeys new ally-Arab unrest-Hussein and his family-The Jihad, or Holy War-The Revolt begins. ABOUT the middle of the nineteenth century, the Turkish Empire stretched across the Near and Middle East from Persias border to Albania, and possessed a shadowy authority in North Africa. With the central government at Constantinople, Turkish rule extended from the Black Sea to southern Arabia, and within the Empires frontiers there lived many Christian peoples, such as the Armenians in Asia Minor and the Bulgars and Serbs in the Balkans. Northward the might of Russia pressed against the frontiers, and Turkey often had cause to be uneasy. For one thing the Czars avowed desire and privilege was to protect the Christian subjects of the Sultan, who were often brutally treated by their Mahomedan rulers. This ill-treatment was by no means always due to intolerance of the Infidel--sometimes it rose out of greed for plunder where a Christian community was prosperous and again because some of the subject peoples were very conscious of nationality, and chafed under foreign rule. The Greeks had already won their independence. Turkeys strong neighbour had another reason for anxiety and irritation, for this weak, ill-knit, backward, heterogeneous State lay across the Bosphorus and the............