Kindergarten SoldierThe Military Thought of Lawrence of Arabia

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Kindergarten Soldier: The Military Thought of Lawrence of Arabia

J. A. English

Military Affairs, Vol. 51, No. 1. (Jan., 1987), pp. 7-11.

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Kindergarten

Soldier:

The Military

Thought of

Lawrence

of rabia

by J.

A

English

Princess Patricia s

Canadian Light Infantry

I feel a fundamental crippling incuriousness about

our officers. Too much body and too little head.

HE slight irony in the foregoing expression of concern by

Lawrence of Arabia was that he was physical ly a rather

smallish man with a larger than normal he ad. H e was describe d,

nonetheless, as being incredibly tough. For two years he

l ived and fought with the Arabs; he w ore Ara b clothes, ate Arab

food, and suffered Arab diseases and fleas. Though he con-

sidered himself not a man of action, he made a point of doing

anything the Arabs could do and do ing it better. A ble to ride a

camel faster than many of them, he could reputedly also run

alongside one that was moving and swing the roughly nine feet

into its saddle easier than m ost othe rs. Becau se of feats like this,

the Arabs readi ly accepted him and w ere prepared t o follow him

to the end s of the earth. Y et , while he might have stepped from

the pages of Kipling, Law rence w as more than a n imperial her o;

he wa s also a prophet , whose message was that war was not only

an affair of flesh and blood, but one of ideas. ' It is for this reason

J NU RY

987

MI

that the chronological development of his mil i tary thought

should be of interest to practicing military professionals.

Notwithstanding that Law rence's A rab campaign was essen-

tially a sideshow to a sideshow , a tussel in a turnip field, he

wrote, its aura of high adventure and glamour thrust him into

legend. With over 30 books w ritten about him, he remains after

Winston Churchill arguably the m ost renowned Englishman of

the 20th century. His own

Seven Pillars of Wisdom was ranked

by the lat ter among the greatest books ever wri t ten in the

English language. While literary quality alone ensures its

place in this category , it also continues to sta nd as an essentially

accurate account of the Arab Revolt. Yet it is more than epic

history, for hidden within its pages is a profundity of military

thought that remains relevant to this day. Lawrence's military

leadership, moreover, has been compared with that of Marl-

borough and Napoleon, on whose birthdate he was born. He ha s

been hailed as the progenitor of mo dem guerrilla warfa re and as

the master from whom Orde

Wingate and Lord Wave11 drew

lessons of s trategy and tact ics; the man to w hom, according to

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the widespread use of guerrilla warfare



f rom World War I1 onwards can be ind irect ly a t t r i b ~ te d .~y his

own admission, howe ver, Law renc e was unlike a soldier and

hated soldiering '; he was essentially an Oxford intellectual

who remained obdurately and often infuriatingly civilian be-

neath his uniforms. 4

N a truly professional military sense , howev er, La wre nce

was much in advanc e of most regular officers. And this was

directly due to the depth and breadth of his personal learning.

Around the age of fifteen he began to read wh at he subseq uently

described as the usual school boy stuff ' : Creasy's Fifteen

Decisive Battles of the World; Napier's History of the War in

the P eninsula; Coxe's Marlborough; Mahan's Influence of Sea

Power U pon History; and Henderson's Stonewall Jackson (the

last, according to Liddell Ha rt, the bounds of many a Staff

College student's horizon ). Mixed with these, Lawrenc e read

many technical treatises by scholars of antiquity such as the

Roman Vegetius and the Byzantine Procopius, military sec-

retary to B elisarius, who practiced avoidance of pitched battles.

Before and during his stay at Oxford, Lawrence also travelled

five times to Fran ce to study castles and battlefields. H e visited

Crecy, Agincourt , Rocroi , Malplaquet , Valmy, Sedan, and

several other Franco-Prussian fields of battle. He studied the

tactics of Henry of Navarre and tried to re-fight the whole of

Marlborough's wars. In pursuit of interests that were primarily

medieval, he also claimed to have visited every 12th Century

castle in Franc e, England, and W ales, and went elaborately into

siege manoeuv res.

. . .

Increasingly, the Crusade s became the

subject of his special interest, ultimately prompting his 1909

four-month tour of the Leva nt to study C rusader castles. On his

return he submitted his thesis on The Military Architecture of

the Crusades, which argued that the Crusaders had taken to the

Middle Ea st those very principles of military a rchitecture tha t

certain scholars had previously claimed the Crusaders brought

from the Middle East. '

La wr en ce: ~ Oxford curiosity eventually took him past the

tactical campaigns of Hannibal, Belisarius, and Napoleon to

Clausewitz and his school, to Caem merer and Moltke, Goltz

and the recent [post-18701 Frenchm en, all of whose books

seemed to him to be very partial or one-sided. After

looking at Jomini and Willisen, he discovered broader prin-

ciples in Guibert, Bourcet, de Saxe, and 18th-century think-

ers. Clausewitz, however, proved to be intellectually s o much

the master of them and his book s o logical and fascinating, that

Lawrence

unconsciously . . . accepted his finality and came

to bel ieve in him. Thus i t was that he also came to be

obsessed by the dictum of Foch that the aim in mode rn

absolute war was to seek the destruction of the organized

forces of the enemy by the one process battle. To this point,

of course, Law rence's concerns centred mainly on the abstract ,

the theory and philosophy of warfare especially from the

metaphysical side. With the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in

June 1916, they would become more concrete. He would find

himself as eminenc e grise

to Emir Feisal compelled suddenly

to action, to find an immediate equation between

. . .

book-

reading and

.

[tactical] movements. '

The Revolt began with abortive attacks by inexperienced

Arab tribesmen on Turkish ganisons in Medina and Mecca.

While poor road communications shortly forced the Turks to

abandon Mecca, they chose to dispatch an expeditionary force

to Medina, which w as linked by rail to the main Turkish Army

in Syria. This force subsequently began to advance on Mecca

and the Red Sea port of Rabegh, considered by many British

officers to be the key to M ecca. The actual defence of Rabegh,

howev er, w as thought to d epend largely on the availability of

regular troops acting in concert with the Red Sea Fleet. Un-

fortunately, these were not forthcoming in sufficient number,

and when the Turks roughly swept aside Feisal 's defending

Arab irregulars deployed in what Lawrence had erroneously

assessed as impregnable hills, both Rabegh and Yenb o were

threa tened . In January 1917, therefore, Law rence and Feisal

turned their backs on Mecca and Rabegh and marched 200 miles

north via Yenbo to cap ture W ejh, from where they thought they

could better cut Turkish rail communications. T heir attention,

clearly, remained fixed on Medina and on how to render it

vu lnerable to capture by sever ing i t s umbi l ical cord , the

Damascus-Medina railroad. It was generally believed that the

fall of Medina was a necessary preliminary to the further pro-

gress of the Arab Revolt. ' In the practical domain of warfare,

Law rence w as obviously still a neophy te. This was to change in

the course of the Hejaz campaign.

While engaged in making every effort

. t o cap t u re

Medina , Law renc e fell painfully ill for a ten-d ay period at Abu

Markh a. Claiming that as usual in such circumstances his

mind cleared and his senses sha rpen ed, he began seriously to

review and contemplate the nature and course of the Arab

Revolt . I t quickly dawned on him that the Hejaz War had

actually been won with the capture of Wejh, but that no one

had had wit to see it :*

We we re in occupation of 99 percent of the Hejaz. The

Turks were welcome to the other fraction till peace or

doomsday . This part of the war was over, so why

bother ab out Medina? It was no base for us like Rabegh,

no threat to the Turks like Wejh: just a blind alley for

both. The Turks sat in it on the defensive, immobile,

eating for food the transport animals which were to have

moved them to Mecca, but for which there was no pasture

in their now restricted lines. They were harmless sitting

there; if we took them prisoner they cost us food and

guards in Egypt; if we drove them northward into Syria,

they would join the main Army blocking us in Sinai.'

The movement to Wejh, in fact , modulated the enemy's

action like a pendulum ; rathe r than enter Rabegh the Turks

(who were almost there) fell back to Medina. There they split

their forces: one half entrenched about the city; the other dis-

persed throughout the length of the Hejaz railway to protect it

from Arab irregular action. Lawrence could now see that even

to cut the railway would be folly; the ideal was to keep his

railway just working, but only just, with the maximum loss and

discomfort. n

Not surprisingly, Lawrence began to accept that it was pos-

sible to follow the direction of de Saxe and attain victory

without battle. He postulated, moreover, that because Arab

irregulars constituted no organized force , a Turkish Foch

could not really have an aim. It appe ared to him, conseque ntly,

that the Fochian ideal represented but on e highly extermi-

native variety of war , no more absolute than another.

Reminding himself that Clausew itz en um erate d all sorts of

war

. . personal w ars, joint-proxy due ls, for dynastic reasons

commercial war s, for trade objects, he ventured that the

Arab aim was geographical, to extrude the Turks from all

Arab-speaking lands. In accomplishing this aim , Turks might

be killed, for they w ere disliked very m uch, but the killing of

Turks in itself would never be an excuse or aim. If they would go

quietly, the Arab Revolt would e nd; if no t, blood would be shed

to drive them out, but as little as possible.

AV ING generally determined the prop er course of the Arab

Revolt , Law rence proceeded to juxtapose the whole

house of war in its structural aspect, which w as strategy, in its

arrangements, which were tactics, and in the sentiment of its

inhabitants, which was psychology. Th e first confusion he

suspected w as a seemingly false antithesis between strategy and

tactics. To Lawrenc e, these were only points of view from

which to ponder the elements of war. Like J.F. C. Fuller,

Lawrence agreed there were three elements, but he declared

them to be the Algebraical element of things, the Biological

element of lives, and the Psychological element of ideas. The

first element, or hecastics

as La wrence delighted in terming it,

M I L I T RY FF I RS



appeared to be purely scientific, subject to the laws of math-

ematics, devoid of humanity, and essent ial ly formulable. I t

deal t with known invariables, f i e d condit ions, space and t ime,

inorganic things l ike hi l ls and cl imates and rai lways, with

mankind in masses too great for individual variety assisted by

mechanical means. In the Arab case, this aspect meant fo-

cussing on how the Tu rks would defend the are as to be l iberated.

In Lawren ce's view, it would no doubt take the form of a

trench line across the bottom if we came like an army with

banners. But , he reasone d,

suppose we we re an influence an idea, a thing

invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting

about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a

whole, fi rm-rooted, nourished through long stems t o the

head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed.

Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind, and as we wanted

nothing material to live on, so perh aps we offered nothing

material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might

be helpless without a target . He would own the ground he

sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.12

Lawrence ul timately appreciated that the Tu rks would require

roughly 600 000men to subjugate Arab temto ry; a s they had but

100 000 t roops avai lab le , however , the process would be

messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife. 13

Lawrence's second element , which he called bionomics had

to do with the breaking point, li fe and death, or less fi a l l y ,

wea r and tear. In his opinion, Foc h and othe r philosoph ers of

war had made an art of i t and elevated one aspe ct , the shedding

of blood, as the price of victory. It wa s humanity in battle, a

leavening of sensi t ive an d i llogical variabi l i ty, aga inst

which generals gu arded themse lves by the device of a re-

serve. It wa s not the nine-tenths of tactics certain enoug h

to be teachab le in schools, but rather the irrational tenth

that could be felt mainly by instinct and remained forever the

test of genera1s.Bionomics was not limited to humanity, how-

eve r, and carried ove r into material . In Law rence's opinion, the

key w as to at tack, not the Turkish Army but i ts materials; the

destruction of a Turkish bridge or railway, mac hine or gun, or

cache of high explosive wa s far more profitable than the de ath of

a Turkish soldier. In the A rab Army, on the o ther hand, mate-

rials were easier to replace than casual t ies . This natural ly

d i c t a t ed a war o f de t achm en t i n wh i ch a t t ac ks were

launched, not necessari ly against enemy weaknesses or even

strengths, but, instead, against his most tactically accessible

material . There thus developed an unconscious habit of never

engaging the enemy at all. 14 The Turkish soldier was rarely

given a target.

Borrowing a word from Xenophon's

Anabasis

Lawrence

described his third or Psychological element as diathetics. The

scope of diathet ics was unbound ed; i t encompassed propaganda

and the motivation and conditioning of one's own soldiers in

group s and as individuals. Essentially, it dealt with uncon-

tro l lab le~ , i th subjects incapable of direct command. Begin-

ning with his own troops Lawrence placed diathetics in per-

spective as follows:

We had to arrange their minds in order of battle, just as

carefully and as formally as other officers arranged their

bodies: not only our own men's minds, though them first:

the minds of the enem y, so far as we could reach them: and

thirdly, the mind of the nation supporting us behind the

fiing -line , and the mind of the hostile nation waiting the

verdict, and the neutrals looking on.Is

In Lawrence 's view, the diathethic was more than half the

command. H e saw war as not just a matter of weapons and

bloodshed bu t of ideas and intellect. In the Ara b Revolt regular

forc es were so scarce that irregulars could not let the meta-

physical weapon rust unused . The effectiveness of the Arab

army was based on the personal effectiveness of the individual

fighter.

l 6

Lawrence concluded that the Algebraical element translated

into terms of Arabia fitted like a glove. Bionomics, in turn,

determined the tactical approach most appropriate for Arab

tribesmen. Battles in Arabia were considered a mistake, the

only direct benefit emanating from the amount of ammunition

fired off by the enemy . They seemed to Lawrence imposit ions

on the side which believed itself weaker, hazards made un-

avoidable either by lack of land room o r by the need to defend a

material proper ty dear er than the lives of soldiers. This wa s

his refinement of de Saxe , to whom irrational b attles were the

refuge of fools. Clearly, the Arabs lacked hitting power, but as

they had n o material to lose, they had nothing really to defen d.

Their strength lay in speed and time, in bully beef rather than

gunpowder.

CCO RDING to Liddell Ha rt , Lawrence was more deeply

steeped in knowledge of war than any oth er general of the

[Great] war. H e was also, in the assessme nt of Brigadier

Shelford Bidwell, able to say as much in one paragraph as

Clausewitz says in a chapter. '* But i f Law rence's highly

intellectual approach enabled him to master strategy, his tact-

ical skill was founded upon practical experience and an im-

pressive ability t o apprec iate a situation logically. Wh eneve r he

took a decision or adopted an alternative, it wa s only after

studying every relevant and many an irrelevant factor.

Arab tribal structure, religion, social customs, language, and

appetites, a s well as geography, were all at his finger-ends.

He also had an excel lent eye for ground. H e quickly pointed out ,

for example, that an at temp t to take Akaba from the seaward

would d i sgorge a t tacking forces onto a beach where they

would be as unfavourably placed as on Gallipoli [and]

under observa tion and gun-fire from coastal granite hills,

thousand s of feet high, mpracticable for heavy troops: the

passes through them being formidable defiles, very costly to

assault or to cover. *O One can additionally sense Lawrence's

feel for ground from the following topographical description

related to his greatest victory, the battle of

Tafiieh:

The road dipped into a grove of fig-trees, knots of blue

snaky boug hs; bare, a s they would be long after the res t of

nature was grown green. Thence i t turned eastward, to

wind lengthily in the valley to the crest. I left it, climbing

straight up the cliffs. [This] shortene d my time

appreciably, and very soon, at the top , I found a level bi t ,

and then a last ridge overlooking the plateau.

This last straight bank, with Byzantine foundations in

it, seemed very proper for a reserve or ultimate line of

defence for Tafileh. To be su re, we had no reserve a s yet

but here was their place.

The tiny plain [of the com ing battlefield] was abou t two

miles across, bounded by low green ridges, and roughly

triangular, with my reserve ridge as base.'l

In fact, one could draw a parallel betwe en Law rence's masterful

descriptions of ground in Seven Pillars of Wisdom and a soldier

training for the sniper t rade drawing panoramas. T he fi rs t uses

words; the second, sketches. Both are works of art .

As Lawrence saw i t , s t rategy was eternal , and the same and

true, but tactics were the ever-changing languages through

which it speaks. While a general could learn from Belisarius

as from Haig, soldiers could not they had to know their

mean s. 2z That L awre nce kne w his means there can be little

doubt. He was well acquainted with the use of demolitions and

mines, and he too k a keen intere st in wea ponry. W hile rejecting

bayon ets as unintelligent masse s of steel, generally fatal to the

fool behind them, he embrac ed the light autom atic rifle. Ma-

chine guns proper, exc ept when mounted in armoured vehicles,

were too heavy for the tempi of his battles; autom atics such

as the Lewis l ight machine gun o r Hotchkiss (more resistant to

mud and sa nd) were his preferen ce. At one point his bodyguard

of

8

men possessed 21 autom atics. Manifesting a prescien ce far

in advance of his era, he also said that were he to gain control of

J NU RY

987



a factory that made Hotchkiss guns, he would have them su per-

sede the rifle. Final testament to Law rence's tactical aucum en,

howe ver, is that he was ultimately able to coordinate combined

operations of camelry , armoured cars , and aeroplanes.

23

When Law renc e published The Evolution of a Revolt in

the first issue of the Army Quarterly in October 1920, it exerted a

profound and seductive influence upon Liddell Hart, who was

already disillusioned by the seeming senseless attrition of the

Great War. Though he would later record in his Memoirs that

they had but a brief exchan ge of letters in 1921 about [this]

reflective article, he had by 1934 published a detailed biog-

raphy of Lawrence. In it he debunked Clausewitz and linked

Lawrence to de Saxe, who always kept his mind on the ul-

timate aim of wa r, to which battle is only a means. He re,

rudely, can be seen the roots of the Indirect Appro ach, that

pervasive philosophy of war developed late r at some length and

in reasonably specific terms by Liddell Hart himself. Essen-

tially, it reiterated the sam e message as The Evolution of a

Revolt the general avoidance of pitched battles, the in-

fluence of ideas, the use of indirect pressu res, an d the value of

small, highly mobile forces of intense firepower. To Shelford

Bidwell, Liddell Ha rt was a synthesizer as much as an orig-

inator ; he was the medium, bu t the ghost was L a ~ r e n c e . '~

In this regard, of cou rse, it is significant to recall Liddell Ha rt 's

comment that of all people he had known personally, including

Winston Churchill , he would ra te T.E . Law rence and David

Lloyd George the most interesting and

gifted. z'

It was worth further notation, m oreover, that in 1927 Law -

rence was invited by Liddell Hart, then military editor to the

Encyclopaedia Bri tannica, to wri te an art icle on gueri l la

warfare. The latter, remembering that article of his felt

that no one was so well fitted to deal with the subject. Fo r

whatever reason, Lawrence was unable to produce such an

article, but he did offer some extremely significant comment.

Stating that-he only limited what he said to irregular warfare

to provoke soldiers to battle on my own ground, he

ventured that for 'irregular war' you could write 'war of

movement' in nearly every p lace, and find the argument fitted as

well or ill as it did. In shor t, the philosophical substance

Lawrence gave to his methods was intended to have more

universal application. He was, after all , one of the few who

really knew his Clausewitz and perceived that there were sev-

eral varieties of war. His major criticism of the great Pru-

ssian theorist was that the logical syste m of Clausew itz

leads astray his disciples -thos e of them , at least, who would

rather fight with their arms than with their legs. Quite obvi-

ous ly , Lawrence balanced Clausewi tz wi th de Saxe, who

warned of the perils of the blind, unthinking adoption of mili-

tary maxims.zh n this contex t, the following comment of Law -

rence to Liddell Hart is most apt:

A surfeit of the hit school brings on an attac k of the

run method ; and then the pendulum swings back. You,

at present, are trying (with very litt le help from those

whose busine ss it is to think upon their profession) to pu t

the balance straight after the orgy of the late war. W hen

you succeed your shee p will pass your bou nds of

discretion, and have to be chivied back by some later

strategist. Back and forward we go.Z7

T would appear, then, that Lawrence's depth of mil i tary

thought makes him more than just the father of modem

guerrilla warfare. The charge that Liddell Hart 's theory of the

Indirect Approach founders because it is based on a limited

interpretation of irregular warfa re and applied to regular war-

fare, must be dismissed accordingly. This is not to say, of

course, that Lawrence is undeserving of being called the in-

tellectual apostle of the guerrilla and deliberate exploitation of

insurgency phenomena. There is indeed reasonably hard evi-

dence to indicate that the philosophically inclined Chinese

took his ideas seriously. As early as 1936 a W estern obse rver

noted that General Lu Cheng-ts 'ao, commander of the Central

Hopei Communist guerrillas, had a copy of Seven Pillars of

Wisdom at his elbow. The general reputedly stated at the time

that he and other guerrilla comman ders considered it to be one

of the standard reference books on strategy. There is also

reason to believe that , even m ore than Sun Tzu, Law rence has

for many years been discreetly plagiarized by Mao Tse-

t u n g , an d h i s ~o h o r t s . ' ~

What Lawrence really did, however, was not devise a pre-

script ion for mo dem gue mlla w arfare; his method was essen-

tially antithetic to the com partmentalization of w ar. In stead , he

looked at th e whole of w arfare to confirm the strategical-tactical

courses of action he adapted to the Arabian scene. To Law-

renc e, war was antinomian subject to rules, perhaps, but

certainly not laws -and in accord with de Saxe 's conception of

war as obscure and imperfect. From Clausewitz he also knew

that two wars seemed seldom alike, and that often the

parties did not know their aim and blundered till the march of

events took control. H e thus mobilized his intellect to com-

pensate for inferior military strength. He was creative rather

than methodical in his approach, and he deliberately adopted

the tactics of the weak . Had be been a Tu rk, he would doubtless

hav e reacted quite differently, though proba bly not less brillian-

tly. We kindergarten soldiers, he wro te, were beginning ou r

art of war in the atm osphere of the tw entieth cen tury, receiving

ou r weapon s without prejudice. T o the regular officer, with the

tradition of forty generations of service behind him, the antique

arm s were the most favoured. No t surprisingly, this kinder-

garten soldier strongly recommended that new soldiers

read an d mark and learn things outside drill manuals and tact-

ical diagrams, for he knew much better than most that, with

2,000 years of examples behind us we have no excuse, when

fighting, for not fighting well. 29

REFEREN ES

1. Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson, The Secret Lives of

Lawrence o f Arabia

(New York: McGraw-Hill. 1970). 9, 89

B H l i ill Hart , T:E. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape

1934), 25-26; Sh elford Bidwell,

Modern Warfare

(London: Al

len Lan e, 1973), 197; and T. E. Law rence, Seven Pillars of

Wisdom (Londo n: Jonathan C ape, 1940), 580.

2. Secret Lives, 1, 87-88, 260; Robert Gra ves and B .H . Lid-

dell Hart, T.E . Lawrence to his Biographers (London: Cassell

1963), 49; and Jeffrey Meyers,

The Wounded Spirit

(London:

Martin Brian O'K effe , 1973), 22, 28,94-95.

3.

Seve n Pillars,

117. Chapter 33 of

Seven Pillars

is based

almost completely on Law renc e's The Evolution of a Revo lt,

Army Quarterly, 1 (Octo ber 1920), 55-69.

4.- James

orris Farewell the Trumpets

(Bungay, Suffolk

Pennu in. 1980). 255.

5 T E

~ a w r e n c e ,

21, 164-166;

Secret Lives,

25-28;

Biogra-

phers, 50; and see a lso Richard Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia

(Londo n: Collins, 1955), 120- 122. Law renc e also rep utedly

studied the campaigns of Mohammed, Saladin, and Egyptian

general Ibrahim Pasha.

Wounde d Spirit ,

17.

6. Secret Lives, 25-28; Seve n P illars, 117, 193-194; T.E. Law-

rence, 165-166; and The Evolution of a Revo lt, Army Quar-

terly, 1 (October 1920), 58. Lawren ce w as greatly affected by

Belisarius, parts of whose campaigns he translated from the

histories of Procopius, which focus on them .

Biogra hers

130

H e a ls o ap p ea rs t o h ave b een s tron gl y in flu en ced g y ~ t : ~ e

Rudolph von Caemm erer, who wrote

The Development of Stra-

tegical Science in which were covered Jomini, Clausewitz

Wilhelm von Willisen (junior to Clausewitz by ten years and

author of Theory of Great W ar , Moltke the Elder, and Colma

von de r Goltz (who wrote the

Conduct of Wa r

and

The Nation in

A r m s . See Rudolph von Gaemmerer, The Development of

Strategical Science (Londo n: Hugh Ree s, 1905). Comte Jacques

d e G u i b e r t w r o t e E s s a i g k n k r a l d e t a c t i c q u e (L i eg e

1775).Pierre de B ourcet w as an e xpert in mountain warfare and

advocated smaller mobile groupings of divisional size.

7 . Secret Lives , 57-58; John E . Mack , A Prince of our

Disorder

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 113, 129, 148-151

MILIT RY FF IRS



Evolution, 55-57; and Col. A.P. W avell, The Palest ine Cam -

paigns

(London: Constable,

1933), 54.

8 . Evolution, 57; and

Seven Pillars

194-195. Lawrence

suffered from fever, dysentry, and boils at Abu Markha, but

meditated when it grew too ho t for dreamless dozing. See

also Desmond Stewart ,

T.E. Lawrence

(New York: Harper

Row. 1977). 245.

9 . ~ v d u t i o n , 58.

10. Zbid. 57; Seven Pillars 232; and Wavell, 55, 203.

1 1

Evolution.

58-59:

and

Seven Pillars. 195-196.

The

Turkish Army was an accident, not a target.

12. Evolution, 59-60; and Seven Pillars 197- 198. Bidwell

states Lawrence borrowed the gas metapho r from Clausewitz

(see Michael How ard and Peter Paret , e ds. ,

On War

(Princeton:

University Press, 1976), 481), but it would app ear he got it from

John 3:8.

Wound ed Spiri t

148.

13.

Seven Pillars

i98.

14.

Zbid..

198-200: and Evolution. 60-61.

15. ~ v o l u t i o n , '61-62; and

Seven Pillars

200-201. Law-

rence wa s obviously heavily influenced by C lausewitz's idea of

friction, cou ntless minor instances and individuals com-

bining to lower the general level of performanc e.

O n War

119.

16. Seven Pillars 201, 348.

17. Zbid. 200-202.

18.

Bidwell,

197.

19.

David G arnett , ed. ,

The Letters of T. E. Lawrence

(Lon-

d o n: J on at ha n C a ~ e . 938). 769: B.H . Liddell Hart .

Memoirs

(London:

asse ell

1965), 348; and

Wounded Spirit

22.

20 . Se v e n P i l l ar s 173. Lawrence ' s epic 600-mile r ide

through the des ert to take Akaba earned for him a recommend-

ation for the Victoria Cross. It was an extremely important

victory for the B ritish at this time, for in March and Ap nl 1917,

they had suffered two d isastrous defeats under the comm and of

General Archibald M urray (to be replaced by G eneral Edmund

Allenby) and had lost

10,000

men.

Wound ed Spiri t 22-23;

and

Secret Lives

91.

21.

Seven Pillars

486-487. Lawrence was awarded the DSO

for his leadership at Tafieh. Prince 158.

22. Biographers 132.

23.

Zbid.

130 (Graves);

Memoirs

348;

Seven Pillars

346;

and Wavell, 203.

24. Bidwell. 194-199: Memoirs 84: and T .E . Lawre nc e

160-171.

25. Memoirs 339.

26. Zbid.. 84-85: and T.E . Lawrence 160-161.

27. Memoirs 85.

28.

James M razek,

The Art of Winning Wars

(London: Leo

Cooper , 1 8), 126-133 , 137- 141; Wound ed Spiri t 29; Bidwell,

47;

and Lt. Col. Frederick Wilkins, Guerrilla W arfare,

5-7,

and Walter D. Jacobs, Mao Tse-tung as a Guerr i lla A

Second Look,

167-168,

both in Franklin Mark, ed.,

Modern

Guerrilla Warfare (Glencoe: Free Press, 1962).

29.

Seven Pillars

1 , 200-201; Evolution, 61; and

Let -

ters

769.

LtCol J.A. English has been a

mem ber of the Direc ting Staff at

t h e C a n a d i a n L a n d F o r c e s

C o m m a n d a n d S t a f f C o l l e g e

since July 1985. A graduate of

the Roya l Mi l i t a ry Co l lege o f

Canada, he received his MA in

H is to ry f rom Duke Un ivers i t y

and his MA in War Studies f rom

the R oyal Mil i tary College. He is

the author of On Infantry (Prae-

ger, 1985) and p rincipa l editor of

The Me chan ized Batt lef ield: A

Tac t i ca l Ana lys i s (Pergamo n-

Brassey s 1985). This art icle was

a c c e p t e d fo r p u b l i c a t i o n i n

March 1986.

JANUARY 987

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