After being labelled the “world’s greatest living explorer”, Sir Ranulph Fiennes is enjoying his retirement by adding to his collection of 24 bestsellers. After biographies of Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton comes TE (Thomas Edward) Lawrence, once called the “uncrowned King of Arabia”.
Fiennes adds to a well-known story with his own experiences of fighting a guerrilla war in the Arabian Desert. This is new material for the first man to walk to the North and South Poles, as well as cross Antarctica. He was sent as a young British Army officer to help the Sultan of Oman put down a “Marxist” insurrection in the 1960s.
He was already an ardent believer in the Lawrence legend, fuelled by David Lean’s 1962 epic movie. “His adventures in the desert were enough to stir the blood, but the complexity of his character also held me in his grip,” Fiennes states, opening his account with Lawrence as a student archaeologist at Carchemish, an ancient Hittite city on the border of modern Turkey and Syria in 1913.
Lawrence immediately identified with the local Arabs, admiring their culture and adopting their dress. According to Fiennes, he was a combination of King Solomon, handing out justice, and a messiah, with healing cures for scorpion bites, cholera and malaria.
On his return as a soldier in 1916, Lawrence found the Middle East was a seething cauldron of conflict. The dying Ottoman Empire was being fought over by German-backed Turkish nationalists, the British, French and Russian empires, and dozens of Bedouin and Arab tribes were seeking independence.
Lawrence immediately embraced the Arab Revolt, partly to restore honour to his family – his father had changed his name from Chapman after leaving his wife and starting a new family with the maid – and avenge his two brothers killed on the Western Front in France.
The British Expeditionary Force in Egypt, commanded from 1917 by General (later Vice Marshall) Edmund Allenby, backed Lawrence’s alliance with Mecca-based King Hussein bin Ali and his sons Feisal and Abdullah. They wanted to seize control of Damascus for a new Arabian empire, with Lawrence leading the way.
These events make up much of his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom, published to great acclaim in 1926. Fiennes brings them back to life with blow-by-blow descriptions. A central event, that scarred Lawrence for life, was his capture and sodomising by a Turkish bey, or provincial governor.
By 1917, Lawrence’s life had become unbearable due to the “Arabs’ incompetence, the Allies’ duplicity, the Turkish sexual assault in Deraa, and the conflict within himself”. Fiennes spends as much time describing Lawrence’s mental health as his military prowess.
Unknown to Lawrence, after the German and Turkish defeat, the Sykes-Picot agreement gave France control of Syria and Lebanon, thus defeating his promises to Hussein. His sons had to be content with getting Iraq and Jordan, countries created by lines on a map. Hussein was later defeated by his rival Ibn Saud, creator of modern Saudi Arabia.
Lawrence’s exploits became world famous after the publication in 1919 of With Lawrence in Arabia, by American photographer and journalist Lowell Thomas. Lawrence represented the desert Arabs at the Versailles peace summit, but theirs was a lost cause.
His fame rose to new heights with Seven Pillars, but Lawrence died nine years later in a motorcycle accident, having joined the RAF as a mechanic under an assumed name.
Fiennes gives a new spin to Lawrence’s enigmatic character and sides with the heroic legacy against detractors who claimed the legend was highly embellished.
