T.E.

COLONEL LAWRENCE: THE MAN BEHIND THE LEGEND--Liddell Hart--Dodd, Mead ($3.75).

Every schoolboy knows something about Lawrence of Arabia; most of them know that he is now Aircraftman Shaw. In his own lifetime Lawrence's fame has grown until his world-wide shadow is more than man-sized. From Revolt in the Desert, his own abridgment of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom* many a reader knows the salient facts of the most monumental chapter of Lawrence's career. His good friend Robert Graves's Lawrence & the Arabian Adventure filled in some further gaps. Now Liddell Hart, also a friend of long standing, attempts to answer all possible pertinent questions about Lawrence and to place him in the niche history is getting ready for him.

Much of Colonel Lawrence: The Man Behind the Legend will be old stuff to Lawrence enthusiasts, but they will want to read it if only for the 14,000 words of quotations from Lawrence's unpublished papers. Liddell Hart, military expert, places Lawrence's Arabian campaign in relation to the rest of the World War and gives the clearest exposition of it extant. He deprecates the view that Lawrence's success as a leader of irregular troops came from innate genius, calls Lawrence a profound student of tactics, a military thinker. Basis of Lawrence's tactical scheme was to avoid battles, destroy Turkish material and morale. Says Lawrence: ". . . Suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like gas? . . . To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife. . . . The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun, or high explosive was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk. . . . We could not afford casualties. . . . Our ideal was to keep his railways just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort to him. . . . We used the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place."

Lawrence was not the only British officer working among the Arabs. For his colleagues he wrote a paper of good advice on The Art of Handling Arabs. Some of his "27 Articles": "Cling tight to your sense of humour. . . . They make no special allowances for you when you dress like them. You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake. . . . Do not think from their conduct that they are careless [about religion]. Their conviction of the truth of their faith, and its share in every act and thought and principle of their daily life is so intimate and intense as to be unconscious, unless roused by opposition. . . . Allusion is more effective than logical exposition; they dislike concise expression."

But Lawrence was no Quaker warrior, did not hesitate to kill when he thought it necessary. Once he shot an Arab in cold blood to prevent the spread of a feud. For a time he carried a British Army rifle which had been captured by the Turks at the Dardanelles, presented to Feisal (before he rebelled) by Enver Pasha, to Lawrence by Feisal. Enver had decorated it with an inscribed gold plate; Lawrence further decorated it with notches--one per Turk. Later he used a Lewis gun stripped of its radiator and casing, which fired "a wonderfully dispersed pattern." That he was an economical leader was shown by his attack on Aqaba: the Arabs lost two men killed, the Turks 1,200 killed and taken prisoner.

Liddell Hart, fairly rubbing his hands over Lawrence's tactics, says of one of his schemes: "A plan so beautifully fitted and yet so flexible must wring an ecstatic sigh from the most jaded connoisseur of military art." He compares Lawrence favorably to Napoleon and to Marlborough; says he "was more steeped in knowledge of war than any of the generals of the last war."

Lawrence's withdrawal into the anonymity of the ranks is not simply a search for monastic peace, says Biographer Liddell Hart. Lawrence deliberately chose aviation because the conquest of the air was "the one big thing left for our generation to do." When Aircraftman Shaw's service engagement expires next year, Liddell Hart thinks Col. T. E. Lawrence may well become a "counsellor unseen" to the British Government.

The Author. Capt. Basil Henry Liddell Hart, 38, is Britain's best-known and most coherent military expert. As a Cambridge University Candidate he enlisted in the Army in 1914, was commanding a battalion at 20. Though badly wounded, he stayed in the Army until 1927, now writes military correspondence for the London Daily Telegraph, is Military Editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. No "jaded connoisseur'' of his subject, he is the author of some 15 books on military strategy, history, biography. Among them: The Decisive Wars of History, The Real War, Great Captains Unveiled.

*Of which only a limited edition of some 110 copies has ever been printed.

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