Thomas Edward Lawrence (August 16, 1888 - May 19, 1935), also known as T. E. Lawrence, and especially as the famous Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence of Arabia), or - among his Arab companions - Aurens or Al-Aurens, is a British archaeologist, officer, adventurer and writer. He achieved notoriety as a British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918. The immense echo that his action knew during these years and after is due both to the reports of the American journalist Lowell Thomas and to his autobiography. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. T. E. Lawrence remained very popular among Arabs for supporting their struggle to free themselves from Ottoman and European yokes. Similarly, the British regard him as one of their country's greatest military heroes. A film was made of his life in 1962, with Peter O'Toole in the title role:Lawrence of Arabia.
Pre-war
Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, Caernafonshire in North Wales, to parents of English and Irish ancestry. Her father, Thomas Chapman, was an important member of the Irish aristocracy who left his tyrannical wife to live with the governess of his daughters, with whom he had five sons. From December 1891 until the spring of 1894 he lived in Dinard and left for Aigues Mortes by bicycle.
Lawrence studied at Jesus College in Oxford. He graduated with honors after writing a thesis entitled The influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture - to the end of the 12th century.
He accepted a post-doctoral position on medieval pottery, but abandoned it after being offered a position as an archaeologist in the Middle East. In December 1910, he left for Beirut, which he left for Jbail (Byblos). He then participated in the excavations of Carchemish ("Kargamis") near Jerablus, in the south of present-day Turkey, under the orders of D.G. Hogarth and R. Campbell-Thompson.
At the end of the summer of 1911, he returned to the United Kingdom for a brief stay and, in November, he returned to the Middle East to work briefly with Williams Flinders Petrie in Kafr Ammar in Egypt. He returns to Karchemish to work with Leonard Woolley. He continued to visit the Middle East regularly to conduct excavations until the start of the First World War. His many trips to Arabia, his life with the Arabs, wearing their clothes, learning their culture, their language and dialects, would prove to be invaluable assets during the conflict.
In January 1914, under cover of archaeological activities, Wooley and Lawrence were sent by the British army on an intelligence mission to the Sinai Peninsula. Lawrence visits Aqaba and Petra in particular. From March to May, Lawrence returns to work in Carchemish. After the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, on the advice of S.F. Newcombe, Lawrence decided not to enlist immediately and waited until October to do so.
The Arab Revolt
Once hired, he was posted to Cairo where he worked for the British military intelligence services. Lawrence's very good knowledge of the Arab people made him an ideal liaison between the British and the Arab forces. In October 1916, he was sent to the desert to report on the activity of Arab nationalist movements. During the war, he fought with Arab troops under the command of Faisal ibn Hussein, a son of the Sharif of Mecca Hussein who led a guerrilla war against the troops of the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence's main contribution to the British effort was to convince the Arabs to coordinate their efforts in order to aid British interests. In particular, he persuaded the Arabs not to drive the Ottomans out of Medina, thus forcing the Turks to retain many troops to protect the city. The Arabs harass the Hejaz Railway which supplies Medina, tying up more Ottoman troops to protect and repair the track. In 1917, Lawrence organized a joint action between Arab troops and the forces of Auda Abu Tayi (until then in the service of the Ottomans) against the strategic port of Aqaba. On July 6, after a daring ground attack, Aqaba fell into Arab hands. In November, he is recognized in Dara while leading a reconnaissance mission disguised as an Arab and is presumably raped by members of the Turkish garrison. He still manages to escape. A year later, on October 1, 1918, Lawrence took part in the capture of Damascus.
Among the Arabs, Lawrence adopts many local customs and soon becomes a friend of Prince Faisal. He became known for wearing white clothes and riding camels and horses in the desert. Towards the end of the war, he tried unsuccessfully to convince his superiors of the interest of the independence of Arabia for the United Kingdom. In July 1920, General Mariano Goybet's French column drove Faisal out of Damascus, shattering Lawrence's hope of liberating Syria.
Post-war
Immediately after the war, Lawrence worked for the Foreign Office and attended the Paris Peace Conference between January and May 1919 as a member of Faisal's delegation. He was then adviser to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office until late 1921.
From 1922 he tried to become anonymous again. He joined the Royal Air Force under the name "Ross". He was quickly unmasked and had to leave the RAF. Under the pseudonym "Shaw", he joined the Royal Tank Corps in 1923. This commitment did not please him, he made multiple requests to join the RAF and finally succeeded in August 1925. At the end of 1926, he was assigned to a base in India, at Miramshah, on the Afghan border and remained there until the end of 1928, when he was repatriated to the United Kingdom following unfounded rumors of espionage in Afghanistan. He then took care of the high-speed boats within the RAF ("Air Sea Rescue" for the rescue of pilots fallen at sea) and had to leave the army with regret at the end of his contract in March 1935. A few weeks later he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dorset. He was 47 years old.
T. E. Lawrence and Vo Nguyen Giap
Beyond the myth, Lawrence of Arabia remains one of the most influential officers in the development of insurrectionary doctrine in the last century. In 1946, French General Raoul Salan conducted several interviews with Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap who planned and conducted military operations against the French until their defeat at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Salan was part of a negotiation mission created to finalize the return of French authority to Vietnam. Later, he will command the French Expeditionary Force in Vietnam from May 20, 1951 until May 1953, and he led the last successful military action against Ho Chi Minh:an offensive called Operation Lorraine, on October 11, 1952, in which the Salan's forces swept through the Red River Valley and the jungles of North Vietnam. The following year, he will hand over his command to General Henri-Eugène Navarre, who will preside over the disaster of Dien Bien Phu. Giap said:
* “[...] Lawrence combined wisdom, integrity, humanity, courage and discipline with empathy, the ability to emotionally identify with both subordinates and superiors. »
During these 1946 interviews, Salan was struck by the influence of one man on Giap's thought; this man was Thomas Edward Lawrence. Giap said to Salan:
* “[...] the Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence is my gospel of combat. He never leaves me. »
The essence of the guerrilla theory to which Giap refers can be found in two places. The first and most accessible is none other than the numerous editions of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, notably chapter 33. The second is an article entitled The Evolution of a Revolt, published in October 1920 in the Army Quarterly and Defense Log. Both are based on Lawrence's practical and thoughtful assessment of the situation facing Arab forces in the Hejaz region of the Saudi desert in March 1917.
The writer
Lawrence was a prolific writer throughout his life. He is the author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He also had extensive correspondence, notably with George Bernard Shaw, Edward Elgar, Winston Churchill, Robert Graves and Edward Morgan Forster. Several epistolary collections were published, some of which were redacted by their publishers.
He wrote The Mint, the account of his experiences as a soldier in the Royal Air Force. Working from his notes written during his service in the Royal Air Force, Lawrence recounted the daily life of the soldiers and his desire to belong:the RAF. This book was published posthumously. Lawrence also translated Homer's Odyssey and Le Gigantesque, a little-known French novel, by Adrian the Raven.
Lawrence's possible homosexuality
Passages in Lawrence's writings and reports from a colleague of his who spanked him suggest that Lawrence had unconventional sexual tastes, including masochism. Although his writings include a clearly erotic and homosexual passage (see quote), his sexual orientations and experiences remain unknown.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom are dedicated to "S.A.", with a poem that begins with:
"I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To gain you Freedom, the seven- pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When I came."
(In some editions of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the last line of this poem is "When we came".
The identity of "S.A." has never been elucidated. It has been assumed that these initials correspond to a man, a woman, a nation or a combination of the above. "HER." could be "Sheikh Ahmed", also called Dahoum, a young Arab who worked with Lawrence in an archaeological site before the war and whom Lawrence would have been very close to. Dahoum died in 1918 of typhus. However, some argue that Dahoum was only a very close friend of Lawrence as happened in the 19th century and early 20th century, which often involved physical (but not sexual) contact. Lawrence himself, perhaps to cover the tracks, claimed that "S.A." was an invented character.
Anecdotes
According to Lawrence's March 12, 1923 military medical records, he was 5'6" tall, weighed 120 lbs, and had "scars on buttocks", "three superficial scars on lower back" and "four superficial scars on left side ". Moreover, he was circumcised.
Since 1923, Lawrence had discovered a passion for motorcycles. He had seven of them, all of whom he baptized with the name George, and with a number according to the order of possession. He was riding "George VII" when he had his accident.
Works
* The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the story of his adventures during the Arab Revolt. (ISBN 0954641809)
* The Matrix (The Mint), the story of his service in the Royal Air Force. (ISBN 0393001962)
* Homer's Odyssey, translated from the Greek. (ISBN 0195068181)
* The Giant Forest, by Adrien Le Corbeau, short story, translated from French, 1924.
* Crusader Castles, his thesis at Oxford. (ISBN 019822964-X)
* The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, selected and edited by Malcolm Brown. (ISBN 0460047337)
* The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett. (ISBN 0883558564)
* Guerilla in the Desert 1916-1918 (Revolt in the Desert), (ISBN 2870274351)
Quotes
I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time... We shall never see his like again. His name will live in history. It will live in the annals of war... It will live in the legends of Arabia. - Winston Churchill, on Lawrence
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity:but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. - The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies-a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not entirely prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themself fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.- The Seven Pillars of Wisdom