Book review: The Conquering Hero - a new look at the career of T. E. Lawrence

A new look at the colorful career of T. E. Lawrence reveals a troubled legacy

Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson

SUZY HANSEN

In the early chapters of Lawrence in Arabia—note the “in”—Scott Anderson describes how the young T. E. Lawrence reacted to the death of his brother. Though the book is named for the British intelligence officer who improbably led an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks during World War I, Anderson threads his expansive history with only a well-chosen few of his hero’s many personality quirks; he even resists the temptation to overquote Lawrence’s florid and funny 1922 autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Yet Lawrence’s curious cruelty to his mother gets considerable space, presumably because it tells us as much about the world in 1914 as it does about Lawrence.

The death of Lawrence’s brother Frank furnishes an especially revealing glimpse into how the well-known, high-Victorian Arabist dealt with a family tragedy. Frank had been killed on the western front by fragments from a German artillery shell. A month after he received the news, Lawrence, who was spending his days idling in Cairo editing an intelligence bulletin for the British military command—the circulation for which “increases automatically as they invent new generals”—finally replied to his mum in a short note: “Today I got Father’s two letters. They are very comfortable reading, and I hope that when I die there will be nothing more to regret. The only thing I feel a little is that there was no need, surely, to go into mourning for him? I cannot see any cause at all. In any case, to die for one’s country is a sort of privilege.” After his mother “upbraided him for not expressing his love for her in her hour of grief,” he replied: “You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come.”

Lawrence is indifferent and brazenly naive, but then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, so were his countrymen, his leaders, and his foes. The young soldiers of the Allied and Central powers went to war enthusiastically, proud to fight for a noble cause and desperate to add meaning to their lives—“war euphoria had gripped the populace” in Britain, as Anderson notes. But in the long tradition of imperial cheerleaders throughout the West, the British were also disastrously ignorant about what was to come. In the East, their judgment was so distorted by racist hatred for the Turks and their longings for the spoils of a conquered Ottoman Empire that not only compassion but consciousness disappeared. “In that summer of 1914, most everyone was overlooking a crucial detail: that the weapons of war had changed so radically over the previous forty years as to render the established notions of its conduct obsolete,” Anderson writes. “These new instruments of war had previously been employed almost exclusively against those who didn’t have them—specifically, those non-Europeans who attempted to resist their imperial reach.”

Europeans were not merely unprepared for the scale of vicious death and destruction that their reveries of conquest would call forth; they also badly misjudged the petty passions that fueled the bloodletting...

read more: http://bookforum.com/inprint/020_03/12165