Commemorations on centenary of Britain's entry into WW1

Among the many individual stories of World War I that will doubtless be told and retold for the centenary years between 2014 and 2018, that of T. E. Lawrence stands out from all the rest. As Scott Anderson says at the beginning of “Lawrence in Arabia,” “historians have never quite decided what to make of the young, bashful Oxford scholar who rode into battle at the head of an Arab army and changed history.”



There have, of course, been shelf-loads of books on Lawrence and his sphere, and an extremely famous film. But the existence of previous works may trouble critics more than readers. After all, somebody keeps buying the stuff. Anderson, a veteran war correspondent and an author of both fiction and nonfiction, gives Lawrence’s story a new spin by contextualizing him in a group biography. He weaves in the lives of three contemporary Middle Eastern spies: Curt Prüfer, a German conspiring with the Ottomans to bring down the British Empire; Aaron Aaronsohn, a Zionist agronomist of Romanian origin, settled in Palestine; and William Yale, an East Coast aristocrat and an agent of Standard Oil who ended up in the service of the American State Department. This allows him to bring in such rousingly modern themes as oil, jihad and Arab-Jewish conflict — though each of these was a markedly different prospect a century ago.



There are also plenty of Middle Easterners in this book — including Prince Faisal, later king of Iraq, and the Turks Djemal Pasha, governor of Syria, and Enver Pasha, minister of war, who The New York Times said in 1915 had a reputation as “the handsomest man in the Turkish Army” (though it is hard to believe the correspondent inspected them all). Even so, Anderson focuses on Westerners and their meddling — the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the Arab revolt — and his book could not be better timed. As global attention is drawn to Syria and Egypt, it is arresting to look back 100 years and see a familiar picture: Britain, France, Russia and the United States gingerly stirring the pot of the Middle East from as far away as possible. The result was familiar, too. “We have appropriated too many Moslem countries for them to have any real trust in our disinterestedness,” Lawrence wrote in 1916.



Anderson’s setting of Lawrence among other foreign agents is an interesting and creative idea, and opens the way for some clever connections, though Prüfer, Aaronsohn and Yale are not historical figures of Lawrence’s stature. Of the three, Aaronsohn provides the best story, thanks not only to his own exploits but also to those of his remarkable sister. Sarah Aaronsohn ditched a husband in Constantinople and went to Palestine to build her own spy ring, drawn in part from her “ardent coterie of male suitors.” When she was interrogated by the Turks, which involved being strapped to a gatepost and beaten, she taunted them “until she fell into unconsciousness.” Aaron Aaronsohn, no less daring, also had a talent for snappy retorts. When Djemal Pasha threatened to hang him, Aaronsohn replied, “Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America”; as Anderson helpfully points out, he was “alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad.”



Yale’s inclusion is more puzzling. Despite being “literally the only American field intelligence officer for the entire region,” he appears to have done little, not least because the region’s oil industry was then in its infancy, and — for reasons not unrelated — so was the interest of the United States government. Eventually, he got himself attached to the British Army, though after a month had “learned virtually nothing.” A moment of potential excitement arrived when he ended up watching British artillery shell Turkish positions in September 1918, but he didn’t like it much: “It was nowhere near as thrilling as the sham battles I had watched as a boy at Van Cortlandt Park,” he wrote. Meanwhile, Lawrence was “careening through the desert around Deraa in a Rolls-Royce armored car, blowing up bridges and tearing up railway tracks, dodging ineffective enemy air attacks, skirmishing with the occasional unlucky Turkish foot patrol.”



A fine storyteller, Anderson does his best to drum up a narrative for his American character but is ultimately defeated by the modesty of the man’s achievements. The hapless Yale might have been better suited to a supporting role in a Graham Greene novel, where he could have had scorn poured upon him by a jaded Englishman. Although Anderson is an American, he takes up that duty. About a particularly poorly informed dispatch Yale sent to the State Department, Anderson says: “He was establishing a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next 95 years.” Ouch.



Regardless of the relative historical value of these individuals, however, the multi­character approach has the great virtue of opening up the story’s complexity. Through his large cast, Anderson is able to explore the muddles of the early-20th-century Middle East from several distinct and enlightening perspectives. Furthermore, while he maintains an invigorating pace, his fabulous details are given room to illuminate. And the book is thick with them, whether it is Lawrence attempting to collar a live leopard; Prüfer arranging 10 days of “boozing, dancing and flirting” with a wayward German princess for Abbas Hilmi, the deposed khedive of Egypt; or Aaronsohn fending off a strikingly biblical plague of locusts.



Anderson’s insight into Lawrence’s character is at its sharpest when it comes to one of the most discussed incidents in his autobiography, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”: the torture and rape he claimed to have suffered while a prisoner in Deraa. Dealing with this episode, too many biographers tend either toward amateur psychoanalysis and sensationalism or bluster, obfuscation, even denial. For some, the question is complicated by suggestions that Lawrence may have been homosexual and clearly was to some degree a masochist. Was the Deraa ­torture-rape a fantasy?



Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration. The fact that Lawrence’s case offers none of these does not mean he was making it up. As Anderson allows, reports of Lawrence’s swift physical recovery may indicate that he exaggerated the severity of his torture — or they may not. Either way, he writes, “something happened in Deraa,” and it is not surprising “that someone enduring such a trauma might wish to adorn its memory with staggering violence, the kind of violence that offers an absolution of guilt by making all questions of will or resistance moot.” This is not a conclusion, but something more nuanced and perhaps more appropriate: considered inconclusiveness.



Anderson is right that historians have never decided what to make of Lawrence. (Indeed, en masse, they never really decide what to make of anything.) Had things gone differently, he writes, “it’s hard to imagine that any of this could possibly have produced a sadder history than what has actually transpired over the past century, a catalog of war, religious strife and brutal dictatorships that has haunted not just the Middle East but the entire world.”