Desert Doings

SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM -- T. E. Lawrence--Doubleday, Doran ($5).

While it cut short the career of one of the most cryptic of modern public figures the death of Colonel T. E. Lawrence also removed the mystery from a book that has become a source of enormous legend and speculation. The first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written in 1919, and a large part of the manuscript was lost in Reading Station while the author was changing trains. A second text, largely done in three months, was checked and corrected throughout 1920, then destroyed by Lawrence. A third text, 330,000 words long, was finished in 1922. From it eight copies were printed, of which five were still in existence in 1927. A fourth text was then issued to subscribers (U. S. price, $20,000), so printed and assembled that no one except Lawrence knew how many copies had been produced. Since the abridgement, published as Revolt in the Desert, ran to only 130,000 words, the legend grew that the expurgated material contained frightful disclosures, savage criticisms of British generals, brutal accounts of barbaric warfare, clarification of Lawrence's misogyny and of his ostentatious distaste for the publicity he avoided with an appalling lack of success.

Last week members of the Book-of-the-Month Club were able to discover for themselves that Seven Pillars of Wisdom belongs in the first rank of personal accounts of the War. If they expected sensational tittle-tattle that would justify the former price and rarity of the book, they were apt to be disappointed. If they were content with a long, careful record of a particularly diffuse type of warfare, written by a sensitive, philosophical Englishman who had exceptional opportunities to observe it, they found Seven Pillars of Wisdom a rewarding study. In it brisk and tumultuous accounts of battles and raiding parties alternate with dark passages of soul-searching and doubt, with plainly unscientific generalizations of Arab customs and beliefs.

The Arab revolt that Lawrence directed, and for whose success he received credit, was in the making long before he arrived in Arabia. When Lawrence, in order to get to Arabia, engineered his release from work in the intelligence service in Cairo, the Arabian revolt had prematurely broken out, was hampered by lack of direction, lack of leadership, lack of military experience. These factors Lawrence and his associates supplied. Choosing Feisal, grave, tactful son of the Sherif of Mecca, as the best of the Arab leaders, Lawrence developed tactics that his friend Liddell Hart, English military expert, later characterized as those of dispersion, "striking at the materials . . . avoiding engagements with the men," substituting for battle "a creeping paralysis produced by an intangible ubiquity." Lawrence's unorthodox maneuvers gave the tribes the type of activity for which they were best fitted. He and Feisal succeeded in delaying, blocking, obstructing Turkish action without experiencing serious losses, keeping Turkish attention focussed on the task of maintaining supplies and communications intact. And all the while the Arab revolt was gaining momentum.

The most extraordinary quality of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is that, almost alone among modern War books, it invests warfare with a degree of glamour and heroism. Nor is this quality purchased by avoiding the gruesome butcheries, stench, gore and decay characteristic of battlefields. The glamour of Seven Pillars of Wisdom springs from the fact that most of the actions undertaken, audacious examples of individual daring such as raids into enemy country, are described with a light and mocking air, as if they were little more than schoolboy pranks. Lawrence evidently treasured all human life except his own. He was constantly testing his personal courage. When he was captured on a spying venture, indecently approached by his captor, tortured and beaten, he was gratified that even in his extreme pain he had remembered to cry out in Arabic.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.