Lawrence
of Arabia is probably the most famous name to come out of the First World War.
It was a long grinding, muddy war in the trenches that ended more with
exhaustion than victory, leaving nobody covered with glory. T. E. Lawrence was
the exception, the lone individual who made a difference, an Englishman riding
a camel out of the golden desert sands of the Middle East. Everywhere else, the
generals are hard to remember, and the politicians ended up with reputations of
blame rather than accomplishment. Other than Lawrence of Arabia, the only name
of a WWI hero that is remembered is the Red Baron-- the top German flying ace.
He wasn’t one of the good guys, but he was the heavyweight champion everyone
else tried to beat. And like Lawrence, he was away from the dirty trenches,
flying solo in the open sky, dog-fighting at a few thousand feet where everyone
could watch his exploits from the ground.
Lawrence
is remembered for organizing the Arab revolt in the desert that drove the Turks
out of Palestine and Syria, bringing down the Ottoman Empire and putting in its
place the Middle East that we know today: the arbitrary partitions that became
Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Israel. Anyone who has seen the
Academy Award-winning film (seven Oscars in 1962) Lawrence of Arabia, will know that Lawrence was full of good
intentions for the Arabs, but was frustrated by the diplomats, especially the
dirty deals between the French and the British. Although Lawrence did his best,
the politicians always mess things up and the result was the endless series of
illegitimate regimes whose resentments and infighting have lasted down to
today. Peter O’Toole, the tall handsome actor who plays Lawrence, drives off
sadly in a car (leaving his camel behind) after his last victory at Damascus,
while Alec Guinness, who plays King Faisal (who in real life became the first
ruler of Iraq) folds his hands and smiles cynically about these Western people
who lack the simple honour of the desert.
We need
to keep reminding ourselves that movies aren’t reality, and that just because
you see it on the screen doesn’t mean that is the way it happened. Movies pick
out a few exemplary scenes, chosen for their dramatic qualities, and fold years
into a few hours. Add the film ethic of show-don’t-tell, and the result is that
what we see on the screen sticks in our memory, but what gets lost is the
tangled web of motives and the thousands of players that determined what went
on. For the reality, there is no substitute for reading long books.
So how
did we get to the towering Peter O’Toole image from the original T. E.
Lawrence? The real Lawrence, as of
1916 when he went off on his mission into the desert, was not only barely five
feet six inches tall, but was just one of the British officers who could speak
Arabic, went out on missions, rode camels, wore desert robes, and led
guerrillas behind enemy lines. How did he get to be the famous one?
The
problem is universal. There are many more capable people than the small number
who get into the narrow spot-light of fame; and that is true in the
intellectual world, in Hollywood,
and in most other things. Most big enterprises take teamwork, with
dozens of prime movers and thousands who contribute; no single hero
accomplishes anything without all those other people. The spot-light on some
necessarily puts many others in the shadows. So how does a particular
individual get the chance to be the one in the spot-light? The career of T. E.
Lawrence tells how.
Myths: Lawrence as isolate and
rebel
The film
image of Lawrence gives the impression that he was a loner. He didn’t like
people, and the British military establishment didn’t like him. He is the true
existentialist hero, who answers to himself alone. Lawrence tells the visiting
American journalist that he likes the desert because it is clean-- while most
of the world isn’t. And Lawrence feels uneasy about the dirty politics he has
to get involved with; he feels uneasy about all sorts of things, whether he is
coming to enjoy killing, whether he is homosexual and likes being flagellated
(homosexuality barely peeping out of the closet in 1962). Lawrence is just
plain uneasy because he is the last honest man in a world full of people who
aren’t.
All of
this is not exactly false; and the way he behaved in the 1920s after he became
famous, up until his mysterious death in 1935, certainly shows he was a
complicated person. But the impression that he was a loner, that he went off
and did things by himself and against all authority, is extremely misleading.
Lawrence was an agent of British policy. He was very familiar with political
factions inside the army and the government, and he strongly agreed with some
policies and opposed others. Lawrence was quick to devise plans for achieving
goals that high-ranking people were glad to hear. He kept getting his chances
because he was the bringer of good news in a war that was full of disasters,
and he offered practical ways to carry out policies that sincere British
imperialists also believed were right-- and cheap at that, since they could use
native Arab troops without putting British boots on the ground. Lawrence was
known for speaking his mind, but the way he spoke to key people went with the
flow, not against the grain.
Throughout
his life, Lawrence had extremely good networks. He started out as a protégé of
the most important British archeologists, and excavating with them is how he
became fluent in Arabic. He quickly moved into the center of British
intelligence-gathering for the Middle Eastern Theatre, and soon had the ear not
only of the local High Commissioner and the military Commander-in-Chief, but of
top cabinet officials in London, the Foreign Office, and the Secretary of War.
He became a confidant of Winston Churchill. It was not a case of who-you-know
rather than what-you-know; that stupid cliché misses the key point that you
have to know how to talk to important people, and that means having something
important to say. Lawrence built his networks by leveraging the importance of
what he could say to them. And vice versa.
Lawrence avoids Emotional
Energy-draining scenes
Charismatic
persons, as I have shown elsewhere * are highly energetic. They are dynamos at
getting things done, and they get other people energized around them. But they
are also good at picking their spots. Charismatic leaders don’t waste their
time and energy on encounters that lead nowhere and only cost them emotional
energy (EE). Jesus, the most charismatic
of all, told his disciples “shake the dust from your shoes” and leave a village
behind once you see that they aren’t going to receive you.
* Napoleon
Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy. http://maren.ink
From
quite early in his career, Lawrence avoided energy-draining social scenes. As a
student at Oxford, he saw no point in trying to get into the aristocratic
circles with their luncheons and drinking parties, or even dining in college.
The posh social life depicted in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited fitted neither Lawrence’s personality nor his
middle-class background. He knew where he wasn’t wanted. That doesn’t mean he
was simply a grind or a timid person. He liked excavating Roman ruins in the
countryside and bicycling in foreign countries. He would carry a pistol on the
streets of Oxford in solitary wanderings late at night and fire it off in the
underground sewers to alarm passersby above, and outside friends’ room to
announce his arrival. There was a long-standing tradition of drunken carousers
climbing into their colleges over the roofs after the gates were locked;
Lawrence was not one of these, as he lived at home, but he had his own way of
raising a little hell breaking rules. Unlike many a college toff, Lawrence
never got caught and was never reprimanded by the college authorities.
Stationed
in Cairo during the war, Lawrence stayed away from the stilted social life of
the British community. Cairo was the headquarters for the High Commissioner,
the center of the British Empire in the Middle East. The round of formal
dinners and receptions presided over by wives of high officials continued
unabated after 1914. Lawrence had invitations, too, as his reputation grew and
his intelligence work made him friends among fellow Arabists. But he turned
down opportunities when his friends entertained the so-called smart set. The
pecking order of titles and social precedent would be condescending to him at
best, and the rigid protocol and bright chatter in platitudes and subtle
put-downs would only bring down his EE. Later in his life, after his return to
England in the 1920s as a famous man, he attended such events sometimes but had
nothing but scorn for vapid sociability. On such an occasion, an aristocratic
lady seated next to him at dinner said, after a series of conversational
sallies, “I’m afraid I don’t interest you very much.” Lawrence replied: “You
don’t interest me at all.”
Formality
for its own sake Lawrence avoided. It gave a taste of social membership and
rank, but he was determined not to play that game. He disliked the rituals of
dressing for dinner and other polite occasions, with their panoply of
white-tie, black-tie, sashes and decorations, and he disliked army protocol of
saluting, marching and donning the prescribed uniform for the different events
of military routine. Regular army “spit and polish” referred to the amount of
time soldiers were required to do things like polishing their boots with their
own spit preparing for inspections. Lawrence would have none of it. Regular army
officers were offended by his sloppy appearance and neglect of military
ceremony.
It seems
ironic that he made his fame as a soldier, and a British officer. In fact, he
became an officer by coming in through a side door. He never underwent officer
training, much less graduated from any of the famous military academies. His
training consisted of weekend exercises at Oxford with the student Signal
Corps, something like an advanced version of Boy Scouts. But he was an
outdoorsman, and even more to the point, a Middle-Eastern explorer, and his
Arabic skills got him into the Intelligence Section at Cairo, first as a
civilian, then with an army rank as lieutenant. When he was sent to advise
Faisal in the desert, with every success he got a more impressive title, and
ended as Colonel Lawrence by the time his Arab levies entered Damascus.
Military
rituals and formalities of self-presentation-- saluting and being saluted to
demonstrate respect for rank, holding one’s posture rigidly for hours, officers
shouting peremptory orders and expecting prompt submission-- were for Lawrence
both superfluous and energy-killing. As he learned from experience, they were
the opposite of effective in motivating Arab warriors in the desert. But even
before then, Lawrence thought military formalities were useless. Certainly for
his own career they were. He became a competent combat soldier, but he learned
it by first-hand observation, a self-directed apprenticeship rather than basic
training in a Western-style army, where formalities were primary. Every drill
sergeant repeats the tradition that automatic obedience to orders is the
essence of being a soldier, and marching in step and being shouted at by NCOs
is the way to learn it. For Lawrence, war was about the realities of dealing
with the enemy and motivating one’s own side; formalities got in the way.
For
Lawrence, military formalities were like aristocratic ladies’ receptions: a lot
of showing off of rank, while deadening one’s perceptions and lowering one’s
energy. One reason he became a charismatic leader was that he avoided
energy-draining situations as much as possible. What remained was to find
stimulating encounters that pumped up his energy. He already was beginning to find them, among the
intellectual leaders at Oxford, and among his fellow Arab experts in Cairo.
From Oxford outsider to
archeological insider
Lawrence
came from an economically comfortable middle-class family, but they were far
from wealthy. One advantage was
that they lived in Oxford, and all the brothers won Oxford scholarships; they
could not have afforded to attend the University otherwise. Lawrence did not go to a “public school” (i.e. the private boarding schools where the English elite
acquired their networks), and instead attended Oxford city high school. In
other words, Lawrence was just the kind of day-boy that aristocratic students
wouldn’t bother to notice. But he did have a head start on his career. Already
as a teen-ager he was an amateur archeologist, digging up pottery fragments and
other artifacts from the ancient Roman period of Britain. Lawrence would take
these to the Ashmolean Museum at the University, and became known to the
curators. By the time he was an undergraduate, he was accompanying famous
archeologists on digs in the Middle East. When he graduated in 1910 he was
granted funds to carry out his own excavations.
The
period before WWI, and continuing again in the 1920s, was a Golden Age of
archeology. Research teams from
universities in England, France, Germany and the United States competed to dig
up remains of the ancient Biblical civilizations, and made sensational finds
like Pharaohs’ untouched tombs. Like rival Great Powers, archeologists divided
up sites from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Lawrence had a good four years in the field,
eventually heading his own expedition on the upper Euphrates River at the
border of what is now Syria and Iraq. (The same territory became the stronghold
of the Islamic State militants in 2014, a little more than 100 years later.)
Lawrence encountered French and German archeologists, consuls and
railroad-builders, the whole face of contemporary imperialism. It was good for
his self-esteem and his emotional energy.
Foreign archeologists and other important visitors traveled under
official permission from the Ottoman Empire, which was severely in debt to the
Western powers. Lawrence, like others, got an escort of Turkish soldiers to
guard against robbers and local troubles. He carried a pistol and showed off.
Lawrence
also found that he could get along well with the natives. He was in daily
contact, hiring and firing, giving orders for the grunt work of digging and
excavating. He became fluent in colloquial Arabic, learning from the ground up
rather than in school. He had found a place where he could be a leader.
Learning to go semi-native
Lawrence
became expert in Arabic manners. He observed the differences among urban
townsmen (who he didn’t like), rural peasants, and the nomadic Bedouin of the
desert. When the war broke out, Lawrence as an intelligence officer had great
success interrogating prisoners. He didn’t threaten them, but guessed where
they came from by their dialect, and chatted about local personalities and
gossip. This quickly earned their trust, and he heard all sorts of information
from the point of view of low-level soldiers in the Turkish army. Lawrence got
to be good at small talk with the natives, just the kind of sociable chit-chat
that he avoided with his British compatriots. The difference was that chatting
with the natives had a purpose-- it brought information, and it gave him an
important status both among the people he talked to, and his colleagues in
Intelligence. Chatting at polite English dinner just underlined his own
marginal position. Among the
Arabs, chatting was energy-gaining; in English society, it was an
energy-drainer.
What
Lawrence was doing was going semi-native. No one ever mistook him for a native,
except for unperceptive European outsiders. His accent and his facial
complexion would label him immediately. But being able to deal with Arabs of
all ranks on a daily basis gave him a special status as a go-between, the
advantages of which were recognized on both sides. Above all, he acquired the
manners for it. Lawrence avoided the style of the arrogant colonial official
shouting orders at the natives. He once commented about such an officer that
any self-respecting servant would murder him. (Later, he was.) By the time he
was leading Arab troops in the desert, visiting British officers noticed that
Lawrence preferred to spend his spare time with the Arabs. Riding with Arab
soldiers in the desert, Lawrence would spend endless hours as they did,
repeating family genealogies, gossiping about old feuds, reciting Arab poems
and songs.
Lawrence
was not the only European to go semi-native. It was fairly common for officers
in the hot Middle East to don at least part Arab dress, sometimes full robes,
but often the head covering against the sun. A British officer in the Gallipoli
campaign had extricated himself and his troops from being overrun in the
trenches by calling out commands to attacking Turkish troops in their own
language, successfully pretending to be a Turkish officer. A German consul at a
diplomatic post in Iran acquired the reputation of “a German Lawrence” by recruiting
an army of tribesmen to fight the British. In short, not all European officers were arrogant
colonialists cut off in their aloof superiority and their cocoon of upper-class
manners. Lawrence worked with officers like Colonel Stewart Newcomb, who accompanied
him into the desert to meet Faisal, and who later commanded his own guerrilla
forces behind enemy lines.
 |
| British officers in Arab garb, 1917 |
The Arabist circle at Cairo GHQ
Lawrence
was acquiring networks. When war broke out in 1914, he was soon recruited by
his archeologist connections into intelligence work. There was already a circle
of scholars and diplomats, skilled in Arabic language and affairs, attached to
the headquarters of the High Commissioner in Egypt. Lawrence, 26 years old, was
low in rank but well-positioned to be noticed for his skills as an
Arabist. The Arab Bureau became
his support group and an important part of his identity.
They
shared the view that the Arabs’ perspective must be taken into account. The
Ottoman Empire was multi-ethnic, and the Young Turk reformers then in charge
had a tricky ideological problem. On the one hand, they were trying to reform
Turkey into a modern, European-style power, including a military alliance with
Germany. On the other hand, they
posed as defenders of the Islamic world from Christian Europe, painting the
English as imperialists. The Turks attempted to leverage the fact that the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina were part of their territory, and maneuvered to have
their war against England declared a jihad. To counter this, the Arab Bureau
favored recruiting Arab tribes to rise against their Turkish overlords, the
British supplying them with arms and support. On the ideological front, the
Islamic message had to be countered by stirring up Arab national identity. The trick was to offer some Arab leader
a kingdom, under benevolent English tutelage: in short, to get them to opt for
the liberal British Empire against the oppressive Turkish one.
Lawrence
did not create the idea of an independence movement for the Arabs. He picked it
up from his colleagues at the Arab Bureau, and did everything he could to
further the plan. His own skills at getting along with the Arabs meshed with
the grand strategy of his team.
The career accelerator:
advantages of staff expert over line authority
Although
Lawrence was an inexperienced civilian with a temporary rank in the Army, his
connections through the Intelligence Section and the Arab Bureau led closely to
the top. His boss in Intelligence, Clayton, became the Chief of Staff to
Wingate, the Army chief confronting Turkish forces threatening Egypt from
Palestine. His own Oxford professor Hogarth became head of the Arab Bureau. The
Minister of War, Kitchener, was an army hero, famed for his victories in the
Sudan, who had made Egypt his base before being promoted to London. The Turkish
war was a side-show to the Western front, but the war in France was a costly
stalemate, with little hope for a decisive victory. If a breakthrough was going
to happen, it might well come through the weaker flank, Germany’s Turkish ally.
Winston Churchill thought so, and as Lord of the Admiralty had pushed the
Gallipoli campaign to take Istanbul from behind. It proved another costly
failure. Still, something might be started by an Arab revolt, that would roll
up the Turkish empire and shift the balance in Europe. At any rate, higher-ups were
primed to listen and give support.
By early
1916, with everything going wrong in France and the Gallipoli campaign a
disaster, Lawrence was given an important mission. Troops had mutinied in the
Turkish army in Iraq. The British had sent an army to support them, but it advanced
too far inland and was cut off.
The Turks counter-attacked and now there was a danger that the British
force itself would be lost. From the Cairo point of view, the problem was made
more intricate by inter-agency rivalry.
The British government in India-- which had its own semi-autonomous
standing and its own Minister in the Cabinet-- regarded Iraq as part of their
expanding sphere of influence; and most of the 10,000 soldiers surrounded there
were from the Indian army, led by British officers. The Cairo and India offices
did not trust each other, but now India was looking for Cairo to bail them out.
Lawrence was sent with two other officers to investigate the situation and see
what could be done. Lawrence sent confidential messages to his chief that the
India staff in Iraq were incompetent and that the force could not be extricated
before supplies and ammunition ran out. Indian army officers tried to evade
blame for the disaster, which was being compared to the surrender at Yorktown
that concluded the American revolution.
Lawrence,
as an outsider, was given authority to negotiate whatever terms could be
reached with the Turkish commander. This was a strange situation: a young
lieutenant sent on an intelligence-gathering mission from the British Middle
Eastern GHQ was put in charge of negotiating the surrender terms of an
Anglo-Indian army under the Government of India. But Lawrence was a linguist and the agent-on-the-ground,
while the India Office was content to let someone else take the disagreeable
duty off their hands. The situation at the battlefield was hopeless, and Lawrence
was unable to get more than assurances from the Turks that the British
prisoners of war would receive decent treatment. He had been given dirty work
to do, but his superiors knew where the blame lay. On his return to Cairo, he
was promoted to captain, with a reputation as a clever agent who could make
good decisions in the field, however eccentric he might be.
It was
an advantage that Lawrence was a staff officer. He had no command over
anything. If that were the case,
he would have been in a chain of command, controlling a small number of troops
below him, while carrying out orders from a series of officers above. But as a
staff officer, he was attached to a collegial group of intelligence experts and
strategists, where his ideas could go directly to the top. A military officer
holds two different statuses: one is the rank (until recently, lieutenant), the
other the position of command.
Lawrence had none of the latter, but it also meant he was not tied down
to a specific position in the hierarchy. His working network trumped his rank,
and made it an unimportant formality.
Already
in the previous year (September 1915) Lawrence’s ideas had reached the top
levels. With Gallipoli a disaster, Lawrence and his Intelligence Section boss
Clayton worked out a plan to hit the Turks in a more vulnerable place: a naval
attack to seize the port of Alexandretta in northern Syria. This would take
advantage of Britain’s naval superiority and could be linked to a national
uprising of Arabs against Turkey. The plan was approved by Kitchener and the
top generals and admirals, and was favorably received by the War Cabinet. But
the French Commander-in-Chief angrily rejected it; we are pouring out our blood
against the Germans, and you English want to take the land of Syria that should
be France’s reward for her sacrifice! French-English rivalries over their
respective empires, as well as their respective battlefronts, would
continuously strain the Arab Bureau’s plans. For Lawrence and his colleagues,
it was always a multi-sided struggle, and the Turks were not the only enemy.
Go-between opportunities: native
revolts and indirect rule
Lawrence’s
opportunity to act as go-between was ideal for increasing his freedom of
action. We have already seen how distrust between the India and Cairo branches
of the British Empire put Lawrence in the position to negotiate the end of the
Iraq campaign with the enemy. Another opportunity was built into the British
structure of indirect rule. The
technique was to find a figurehead ruler who would keep up native traditions
while being directed behind the scenes by a British advisor controlling the
military, treasury, and administration.
Lawrence in Arabia was sent to set up just such an arrangement. If he
improvised and exceeded his authority, he would not be the first. Much of the Empire had been created by
British agents in far-away places who took the initiative, made ad hoc
alliances, and led natives troops in conquests that the British government
would accept as fait accompli; Clive
in India during the 1740s and 1750s was the pattern for many others.
The
power of negotiating agents was highest in multi-sided situations with many
players, and especially where alliances were volatile, and fortunes of the
players rose or fell depending on whether the coalition they joined did well or
badly. This was the situation of the Ottoman Empire. But native revolts were
inherently ambiguous; a local leader might just as well be playing for a better
title, or for his tribe, his family, or just plain money. The plan of the Cairo
Arabists was to detach the Arabs from the Turks and ally them with the British
Empire. But all sides could play
that game; just who comes out on top is still to be decided. In Persia when the war broke out, a
German consul with good language skills, Wilhelm Wassmuss on his own initiative
recruited 3000 native tribesmen to revolt against the Persian puppet
government, leading them in guerrilla warfare and wrecking havoc with the
British sphere of influence.
In
Arabia, all eyes were on Hussain, Sharif of Mecca, who refused to call a jihad
against the British and took the holy city into revolt against the Turks. But that was hardly the end of it. The
Germans believed Hussain could be bribed back into loyalty. Hussain was in the
favorable bargaining position of getting offers on all sides, and could sit
back and consider among them while the bidding mounted. Sit there he did,
satisfied to wait and see what developed, frustrating the British who hoped he
would raise an army to drive the Turks out of the entire Arab-speaking crescent.
On top
of everything, there were the French. Since the British seemed to be
accomplishing nothing, and the French didn’t trust them when it came to
empire-building, they decided to
steer their own Arab revolt with a pro-French figurehead. The French already
had an enclave in Lebanon, and sent forces down the Red Sea to Jeddah, the port
nearest to Mecca. The French
leader Colonel Cadi, was even ahead of Lawrence at this point, wearing Arab
robes and carrying a gold dagger, although he also annoyed the British by
raising the French flag over Jeddah. He offered arms and money to Hussain, and
to bring in more troops to beef up Hussain’s forces (and keep their loyalty
with the French). The Arabist faction in Cairo had to act. They sent a mission
to Jeddah, including their best field agent, Lawrence.
Lawrence chooses the network
bridge and shapes the Arab Revolt
Sociological
theory of networks says that the best position to be in is where networks are
separated, and you get to be the only bridge between them. Two different
networks cut off from each other are distinct pools of information. If you can
make the unique connection from your own network to the other, you can use
information that no one else has. You are a step ahead of the competition; you
can get the job, make the investment, publish the big news story, put together
the invention and announce the discovery first. Ron Burt calls this the theory
of structural holes; his research on business careers shows that the advantage
goes to the person who becomes the bridge across the hole.
But in
the volatile situation of multiple possible alliances that Lawrence found
himself in, it wasn’t just a matter of establishing a bridge to the other
network. In this fluid situation,
it wasn’t clear who was the key person to contact on the other side. Most
people thought it was Hussain. But when Lawrence arrived in Jeddah, he quickly
concluded that Hussain was the wrong person to lead a revolution. * Hussain’s
son Abdulluh was in Jeddah to meet
the British emissaries. But Lawrence sized him up too: Abdulluh was too timid,
wouldn’t make a move without his father, as Lawrence observed that he held up
negotiations repeatedly to call his father. Lawrence heard there was another
son (Hussain had plenty of wives and children), camped with his forces in the desert. Lawrence got
permission to go inland to visit this son, Faisal, and soon decided he was the
man.
*
Lawrence was right. Even after the Ottomans were defeated, Hussain did not end
up as ruler of Arabia. A rival tribe led by Ibn Saud, which had been hanging in
the background all the time, stepped in and took over the new state, now called
Saudi Arabia.
Faisal
was impressively fierce looking, a warrior, with the prestige and ambition to
lead the revolt the British were looking for. His main problem was his father.
Lawrence’s job was to insinuate that a connection with the British would be
better than relying on Hussain.
Faisal may not have been convinced; like other Arab leaders, he thought
that the British might lose (they were doing poorly in the World War up to this
point), and there had been feelers from the other side. Lawrence’s task was to
buck him up, to build a strong tie between themselves personally that would
carry them along together in the joint enterprise. Of course there was a lot in
it for Faisal; he had the promise of being set up as King of all the
Arab-speaking people, from Arabia around to Iraq. But he had to have confidence
in the British that it would really happen. And that meant having confidence in
Lawrence, who was the point of contact.
Lawrence
was building a bridge, all right, but it was more than just seeing where there
was a hole in the network and making a connection across it. He had to choose
who to connect with; and he had to make the connection strong enough so that it
worked. It wasn’t just a conduit
of information but an alliance for joint action. Advantageous network ties are
sometimes referred to as “weak ties,” because it is easier to get new
information from someone you don’t know well, someone in a different social
circle than your immediate friends who all know the same things. But Lawrence
had to build the connection with Faisal into something that was emotionally
strong. This is often referred to as “trust” or “social capital,” but the terms
are too pallid. What Lawrence had to do was generate emotional energy: to energize his new contact, Faisal,
with feelings of confidence, aggressiveness, initiative, to pick up the ball
and run with it. And the mechanism of emotional energy, as I have explained
elsewhere, is the art of energizing other people while simultaneously
energizing yourself.
Lawrence
building up Faisal was also building up himself. He couldn’t do one without the
other. His networking skills put him on the path to becoming Lawrence of
Arabia.
Once
Lawrence became Faisal’s advisor, the process repeated itself. He didn’t rest
on a static network. Faisal had to
become the leader of a movement, the symbolic point around which the Arabs
would rally. Concretely, this meant recruiting tribes to join his army.
Lawrence himself became the recruiting agent. Now besides being a network link
between Cairo and Faisal, Lawrence becomes the network link between Faisal and
one tribe after another. The tribes were wary, waiting to see which way the
shoe would fall. Lawrence had to convince them. He did this in the name of
Faisal. But he was the one who improvised, concocted schemes, found military
targets they could handle, promised them spoils. He made promises for the
future. To build confidence in the uprising, Lawrence had to invent a good deal
as he went along.
And this
was the way Lawrence operated with his British superiors as well. The further
he got into the desert, and the more tribes he assembled, the more balls he had
to keep in the air. What Lawrence and the Arab Revolt were doing was always a
matter of propaganda and myth. This was not a trait of Lawrence, although his
detractors later said he was a mendacious personality. That wasn’t the way he came across
early in his career, as an archeologist and as an intelligence expert at Cairo,
where his reports were regarded as the most reliable information. It was the
structural position as network bridge, out in the blowing sands of Arab
politics, that made him blow with the winds. Better said: that made the winds
appear to blow the way Lawrence told it. The bridge who builds networks out of
shifting alliances has to become a whirlwind of emotional energy. Lawrence was
on his way to becoming a charismatic leader.
Flows of network resources-- to
the Arabs:
money, weapons, information,
impressiveness
What did
Lawrence have to offer? First of all, money. His government knew that Arab
loyalty wouldn’t be cheap, and they were ready to provide what was needed. Since
the Arabs did not trust paper money, Lawrence carried gold coins from the
British treasury in Cairo. On
campaign, he rode with gold in bags of a thousand pounds sterling. As his
success in recruiting Bedouin tribes grew, his subsidy from the Foreign Office
grew to 200,000 pounds per month-- about $10 million today. [Fromkin 223] The money translated into the weapons
and accoutrements of war. Lawrence could deliver thousands of camels in full
harness, a sign of great wealth and power in the desert. Guns and ammunition
were also provided; as the war progressed, machine guns, artillery and armored
vehicles also arrived, with British military crews to operate them.
The
British empire was wealthiest state in the world at the time; they could afford
the expense. Between 1914 and 1918
Britain spent as much on the war as all the other Allies combined. It was their
pattern to use money rather than their own troops, where possible.
As
Lawrence’s ad hoc army moved north towards the Turkish strongholds, he had complete
authority to distribute gold to whichever tribes he chose. Ceremonially it was
Faisal’s army, but it was Lawrence who built up network connections and kept
them operative with his monthly deliveries of gold. Network theorists take
note: what was passing through this bridge was not primarily information, but
money. The most effective networks provide a flow of material payoffs, where
the paymaster keeps his partners on the hook because they rely on him
repeatedly. The same principle
operates in high finance.
True
enough, Lawrence also had information to provide. The Arabs were amazed at the
details Lawrence could tell them about the disposition of the Turkish
army. Lawrence was relying on the
British intelligence service back in Cairo, with its far-flung agents, its
electronic communications, and its success in breaking Turkish codes. But he
didn’t explain this; his own support network was all the more impressive
because invisible. In fact, Lawrence’s information was of little practical use
to the Arab tribes, except as he organized them, paid them, armed them, and led
them to fight. In that sense, his information was more theatrical display than
a real exchange of advantages.
Remarkably,
although Lawrence was carrying huge sums of gold coins in the desert, he was
never robbed. This shows in how much respect he was held, even by tribes
outside the alliance. His reputation preceded him, and when he arrived, his
charisma did the rest.
Lawrence
wore white robes, with a gold dagger and gold headpiece, given to him by
Faisal. It was the costume of a sharif, although of course the Arabs recognized
he was a European and not a Muslim religious leader. Faisal did not like
Lawrence to appear among them wearing his British army khaki; as his deputy, he
provided Lawrence with the outward signs by which Arabs would immediately
recognize him as a man of wealth and power. When Lawrence reported back to
Cairo, however, he generally resumed his army uniform. The film shows a famous scene when
Lawrence arrives from the desert with news of his military triumph, shocking
British officers by entering headquarters in his desert robes. But on the whole
Lawrence played both ends of his network in the locally appropriate way; one
could see immediately by his outfit which role he was playing.
 |
| Lawrence (left) reports in Cairo, March 1918 |
Flows of network resources -- to
the British High Command:
good news in bad times; cheap
victories; support for the Arabist faction against French imperialism
Lawrence
was not shy about approaching the highest British authorities with his reports
of success among the Arabs. As soon as he reemerged from the desert in November
1916 after fingering Faisal as the leader of the Arab revolt, Lawrence went
immediately to visit all the top British officials in theatre. Without specific
orders, he went to Khartoum in the Sudan to confer with the pro-consul, then
back to Cairo to inform the commanding general that an Arab army could be
raised. He crafted his message to what they wanted to hear. No British troops
would be needed; it wasn’t even desirable to send them into the Muslim holy
land. All it would take was money, some weapons, and above all Lawrence’s
connections in the desert. Almost immediately he was sent back as liaison to
Faisal, carrying everything he asked for.
The time
was auspicious for an enterprise like this. War on the Turkish front had been
an expensive disaster; 250,000 troops lost at Gallipoli. War on the Western
Front was even worse; a million casualties in the bloody stalemates at Verdun
and the Somme during 1916 had convinced many top leaders that the war could not
be won, that a peace would have to be negotiated. The British cabinet was in
crisis; the Prime Minister was about to thrown out. The Germans were winning in
the East, and the Russians were soon in revolution and withdrawing from their
Western alliance. Through this dark period-- from the British war-aims of
view-- Lawrence’s successes in the desert were the one bright spot.
In
reality, for many months his successes were hazy and exaggerated. Not until
June 1917 when his Arab forces took the port of Aqaba did Lawrence have
something palpable to show. But he was his own best promoter, and for the
British, the sole source of information about what was going on with this Arab
army forming in the desert.
And of
course Lawrence’s home base of supporters was cheered and energized. It was
their program he was carrying out. The Arabists knew what the French were
demanding in the Middle East; knew that a secret protocol had been signed in
January 1916 between ministers, the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide up the
Ottoman lands. Like Lawrence, the Arabists in Cairo GHQ were playing a double
game. In Cairo, they pushed to make the promises to the French null and void.
In the desert, Lawrence had to convince Faisal and the Arabs that the agreement
with the French was nothing but Turkish propaganda: that the British really
were going to carry through what Lawrence was promising them: an Arab kingdom
of their own. Double game though it might be, Lawrence had a firm hold. His own
networks, in Cairo and in the desert, believed in him; and he told them what to
believe.
Lawrence’s interactional Style
Lawrence
made an unusual kind of charismatic leader. To his British colleagues, he was
quiet, efficient, and to the point. His informality and lack of military
manners marked him as eccentric, but his reports and advice were always
welcome. He never threw his weight around: how could he? He was a relatively
low-ranking officer. Everything depended on his off-the-books success as
go-between.
Charisma in the desert: quiet,
undomineering, steering the indecisive
With the
Arabs, Lawrence adopted another style. He was a uniquely important person, the
sole conduit to British gold, weapons, and promises of future rule. But
although Lawrence was always in the center, he played it low-key. In Faisal’s
presence, Lawrence treated him as the revered leader, giving him all expected
deference and flattery. Faisal was actually a rather poor military strategist,
and politically he was still wavering as to whether to ally with the British or
let the Turks and Germans buy him out. Lawrence knew Faisal, like the rest of
the Arabs, would only become enthusiastic for the British war effort when the
bandwagon was growing and victory looked inevitable.
Lawrence’s
first task was to strengthen Faisal’s prestige. Lawrence never disagreed with
Faisal, never pointed out weaknesses in his ill-considered plans. An observer
noted that Lawrence in conference with Faisal always spoke softly, “carefully
choosing his words and then lapsing into long silences” [James 183]. No need to
stand on ego; everyone knew who he was, and his magnificent clothes marked him
out as someone they would have to listen to sooner or later. He made himself
indispensable, Faisal’s halo shining ever brighter as Lawrence expanded the
war-coalition in his name.
Away
from Faisal, with the tribal leaders and with his own soldiers in the desert,
Lawrence followed much the same style. He never gave orders; in a memo to his
British colleagues, he told them that the European mind-set of a drill sergeant
would backfire. The very fact that
Faisal had no skills at military tactics left a vacuum for Lawrence to step
into. But he stepped quietly and indirectly. Meetings were free-flowing
discussions. Arab tribes were rather egalitarian, inchoate democracies in the
sense that it was hard for anyone to give orders; the chief got flattery and
deference but rarely obedience. Lawrence would patiently let them talk,
starting divergent plans, flaring with momentary enthusiasms and denials. In
the end, when everyone had had their say and indecision remained floating in
the air like smoke, Lawrence would make his suggestion for action and the
meeting would end. Usually they rode with him.
It was
the charisma of action more than the charisma of authority.
Like
other charismatic leaders, Lawrence was a good micro-observer of individuals.
He carefully studied the Arab leaders and soldiers, discerning which way they
were tending. A master of timing, he sensed the moment when they would move.
Lawrence’s
mastery at indirect control came under test in his final battles, when the
Turkish front was collapsing in the north, and his Arab soldiers were capturing
large numbers of prisoners. Flushed with victory over an emotionally dominated
enemy, Arabs often plundered and killed their prisoners. At times, Lawrence
himself was able to put a stop to it. On one occasion, he prevented a massacre
by calling the warriors to debate over what to do with 200 prisoners. Another
British officer accompanying Lawrence made a speech, in Parliamentary style,
that the Arabs thought was hilarious. The meeting broke up in good humor, the
passion for killing having passed.
In
violence, as in most situations of exerting power, emotional momentum is of the
essence. Lawrence interrupted the timing and broke the emotional tone. Again,
it was quiet charisma. Quiet, but not mysterious for a micro-sociologist.
Charisma is mastery of the micro-interactional details.
Network speed: Lawrence as
modernist
To many
people, Lawrence was a romanticist, harking back to the past. He was
anti-bureaucratic and disliked cities and crowds. He seemed like a wandering
knight escaping the modern world in the desert. But Lawrence was ultra-modern
in one respect: he liked modern technology, and especially the technology of
speed.
Assigned
to Faisal in the desert, Lawrence took a wireless apparatus with him, and a
crew to operate it. He could communicate directly with headquarters, above all
to guarantee the smooth flow of money and weapons. And he controlled the
communications link; when he was off with his troops on camels in the desert,
he alone could decide when to call in. Similarly with airplanes. As his Arab
army grew larger and engaged the Turks more directly in Palestine and
Trans-Jordan, Lawrence recognized the value of air strikes to hit fortified
Turkish positions, and to give a psychological lift to his troops. Airplanes
could land at improvised airstrips in the desert, bringing him ammunition and
money. Lawrence made friends with the pilots, got them to carry out impromptu
raids for him, and used planes to ferry him in and out of the desert. Lawrence
could be an isolate, but only when he wanted to be. As his influence and
reputation grew, he frequently made flying visits to Cairo. He worked his
networks actively for maximal resources and support.
Lawrence
as anti-modernist modernist? It
wasn’t such an unusual combination in the 1920s, when literary and political
alienation from modernity became a prominent theme, indeed a hallmark of “the
lost generation” after the war. Lawrence just had it a little earlier. Aircraft were still quite new, and WWI
greatly expanded their prominence. Lone pilots were heroes, both as fighters
and as explorers. This was part of the attraction for Lawrence, but above all
they gave him network speed.
Similarly
with motor vehicles. Camels had their advantages, especially their ability to
cover hundreds of miles without roads,
go several days without water, and of course without motor fuel. Where
camels were the speedy way to move, Lawrence used them. But he also added
automobiles and armored cars to his repertoire. When he entered Damascus
triumphantly in October 1918, he was wearing his Arab robes, but riding in an
armored car.
Lawrence’s
career shows two crucial ingredients of becoming a charismatic leader: the
micro-interactional techniques that made him impressive to the people he dealt
with, and enabled him to recruit and expand his networks. But also, he rose
above all potential rivals by his network speed. He found the crucial
bridge-position in the networks, and exploited it to the full. As he grew more
powerful, he moved faster and faster, keeping connected with all the different
parts of his far-flung networks: Arab politicians like Faisal, the multifarious
tribal warriors that made up his army, the British army that supported him; his
connections with the High Command in Cairo and increasingly on the far-flung
battlefields of the Middle East; his connections with the Arab Bureau and
through them to top politicians in London. At the height of his career,
Lawrence became a demon of network speed. He was visible everywhere: here and
then gone, reappearing unexpectedly. How fast the network operated was up to
him.
The facade of Arab guerrilla war
The
truth of the matter is that Lawrence’s Arab army was not very important. The
main action in the Middle Eastern Theatre was a regular-style war near the
coast, where the British army had 150,000 men guarding the Suez Canal against a
Turkish army threatening Egypt. In 1916-17, Lawrence had a few hundred Arab
warriors intermittently raiding the Turkish railroad connection down into the
Arabian peninsula. These raids occupied the attention of a few thousand Turkish
troops, but in fact the railroad was never broken. Turkish railroad troops were
quick to repair the line, and they had plenty of materials stockpiled from
pre-war plans to build more railway lines. Nevertheless British GHQ were happy
with Lawrence’s periodic reports, and assured the War Office they were getting
good returns on all the gold they were pouring into Arabia.
Although
it was a military side-show, it was becoming a political snowball. Lawrence had
seized his informal role as Faisal’s free-lance recruiting officer and was
beginning a gathering avalanche of emotional energy, energizing the desert
tribes and himself at the center of it. Lawrence’s Arab raiders largely
confined themselves to destroying trains and railroads. Lawrence himself
carried the dynamite and set off the fuses. The desert tribes regarded these
explosions as a great show, and enthusiastically rushed to the scene. Lawrence
himself commented that whatever its military effect, “the noise of dynamite explosions
we find everywhere the most effective propaganda measure possible.” [James 212]
The Arab
troops were not effective in conventional warfare. Their style of fighting was
that of tribal forces everywhere, ambushes and raids upon unsuspecting enemies.
Faced with determined resistance, their traditional tactic was to retreat,
using mobility of their horses or camels to get away. Lawrence quickly
understood this. Desert warriors would “attack like fiends,” shouting and
firing in the air, especially when they spied booty like a derailed railroad
car. [James 180] When the emotional momentum shifted, they would fade away just
as quickly. The Turks had a disciplined modern army, accustomed to holding
ranks and taking orders, and the Arab raiders were no match for them when it
came to sustained firepower. Lawrence soon acquired the Arabs’ attitude about
taking casualties; even a few men killed in a raid was considered too high a
price, and a battle of attrition was out of the question.
Lawrence
eventually saw that he needed propaganda victories more than anything
else. He began to shift his
recruiting campaign among the desert tribes further and further north. Raiding
the railroad to Medina, 500 miles down the Arabian peninsula, was becoming
repetitious, and too far from the grand objective, which was to liberate the
entire Arab-speaking crescent in Palestine and Syria. The plan of the Arab Bureau had been to foment an Arab
revolt behind enemy lines, but this never happened; local populations were too
cautious, awaiting military events before they changed overt allegiance.
Lawrence decided to push his recruitment campaign as Faisal’s agent northward
out of Arabia.
The
target became Aqaba. On today’s map, it is the bottom-most outpost of Israel,
at the head of a narrow gulf forming the eastern side of the triangle of the
Sinai desert-- the western side of the triangle being the Red Sea, with the
Suez canal at the top. In 1917, there was no state of Israel, just a large
British army east of Suez, facing off against a large Turkish army in
Palestine.
GHQ
agreed that taking Aqaba would give the British an alternative line of advance,
a back door into Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. But a naval assault would
be costly. The Turks had big guns covering the water approaches. Troops could
be landed on the beaches to take the guns; but this looked like a repeat of the
Gallipoli campaign to take out the guns on the straits of the Dardanelles, that
had ended in a disaster of trench warfare. While the planners wavered, Lawrence
took matters into his own hands. Leading a small column of 36 men, he recruited
among tribes in the northern desert, with his usual gold and his growing
reputation. A 14-day circuitous journey through remote deserts brought his
little army into Aqaba from the land side, where the Turks had no defenses,
never expecting anyone would attack from that direction. The Arab army took 600 prisoners and
Lawrence immediately set off across the Sinai by camel to bring the news to
Cairo. Four days later the British navy was in Aqaba with supplies and
weapons. It would become
Lawrence’s new base of operations-- and not incidentally, for the flow of gold
that he would use to recruit a far larger army, as many as 4000 tribesmen, for
the advance into Syria.
Lawrence at maximal freedom of
action
Lawrence’s
arrival in Cairo in July 1917 with news of the conquest of Aqaba created a
sensation. The Arabs were advancing out of Arabia, and now it was “Lawrence’s
Arabs.” Full of his own emotional energy, Lawrence presented a new plan to the
C-in-C of British forces in Egypt, General Allenby. The regular army would advance along the coast; the Arab
army would operate inland, distracting the Turks; the two armies would converge
on the major objects of attack, Jerusalem, and then Damascus. Allenby agreed.
In
reality, it always remained unclear just what the Arab army contributed. The
size of its forces fluctuated from week to week, depending on local fortunes
and Lawrence’s on-going recruitment. Nominally the chain of command was from
Faisal, but Lawrence as liaison to Faisal had all the initiative. Lawrence was
placed directly under Allenby’s command, but everything depended on when
Lawrence would show up from the desert and what he would report.
Now that
Lawrence was operating in closer conjunction with the main British army, the
character of his own army began to change. It became a pseudo-Arab army, in
part high-tech weapons and troops to operate them, in part camel warriors from
the desert. Through the port at Aqaba came a stream of equipment, British
officers, even regular army troops. “Lawrence’s Arab Army” acquired supporting
forces in signals, supply, transport, armored cars, mobile artillery.
Lawrence’s raiders were not just hitting railroads and isolated Turkish
outposts, but confronting well-armed garrisons. It was not the kind of warfare
the Arabs were good at; and the brunt of the serious fighting was carried out
by the non-Arab forces and their heavy weapons. Lawrence, although not a trained military officer, learned
on the fly; soon he was a reasonably competent battlefield commander, who knew
the limits of his Arab troops, managed forces held in reserve, called in
artillery support and RAF air strikes. Even so it was touch and go. The Arab
army made slow going in the latter half of 1917 and into 1918 up the backside
of the Palestine front, attacking Turkish bases in what is now Jordan.
There
were more British officers with Lawrence now, and they saw the weaknesses of
the Arabs, calling them “fickle and feckless,” [James 290] and noting their
inability to fight disciplined Turkish troops. At best, it was becoming a war
of attrition against the Turks, a war where regular army forces were carrying
most of the load.
Nevertheless,
even as the character of the war was becoming less romantic, Lawrence’s legend
was growing. Access through Aqaba and by plane allowed a considerable number of
British officers and even civilians to visit him in the desert. One of his friends, an aristocratic
Member of Parliament, rode 300 miles with him on camels. The officers assigned
to desert duty came to adopt Lawrence’s ways, dispensing with army regulations,
growing beards and dressing in make-shift uniforms or even in Arab robes They
were charmed by Lawrence’s non-directive, egalitarian style and the aura of
success that swirled around him as he disappeared and reappeared. In reality,
there were many military failures on remote battle sites, but “a few famous
successes made up for many unspectacular failures.” [290] The British field staff with the Arab
Army nicknamed themselves “Hedgehog” (from a complicated military acronym) and
acquired the camaraderie of an exciting adventure. Like the retinue of a
charismatic leader, those who had personally been around Lawrence became
disciples propagating his legend.
Ordinary
British enlisted men (what the Brits call “other ranks”) called him a “wizard”
and were astounded by his informality with them.
Among
the Arabs, Lawrence always made a dramatic appearance. He would ride up with 20
bodyguards, mounted on the best thoroughbred camels and splendid in coats of
many colours, his approach greeted by excited shouts. It was the gold, of
course, and the growing tide of victories; but more than that, Lawrence rode
among them in an aura of charisma. Stories about him were circulating as more
and more tribes joined in: his reputation for courage, his exploits behind
enemy lines, the exciting things that were always happening around him.
 |
| Lawrence with Arab troops, 1917 |
It was
during this period that an enterprising American newsman, Lowell Thomas, flew
in to interview him. Thomas’s film would make Lawrence a transatlantic hero.
Lawrence’s Emotional Energy
struggles and his quest for dangerous adventures
Lawrence’s
time was becoming increasingly taken up with administration, as de facto
commander of Faisal’s army with a large and crucial contingent of modern
British forces. He often traveled by car or lorry rather than by camel, for
greater speed and to keep up with the far-flung claims on his attention. He
reported to headquarters by plane and boat. Nevertheless, at this very time,
Lawrence became even more adventurous, going off on missions on his own.
Although
he could have stayed back in his role as commander-- given his rank and
responsibilities, should have stayed
back-- Lawrence led train attacks in person. He still set dynamite fuses
himself, was grazed by bullets, and on occasion was knocked unconscious. He
reconnoitered and raided with small groups far behind enemy lines, around the
expected line of advance towards Damascus. Alone except for his Arab servant
boy, disguised in robes borrowed from gypsy prostitutes, Lawrence followed a
group of prostitutes into Amman (now capital of Jordan) to look around; stopped
by Turkish soldiers, he was barely able to escape. On the way back, his servant was badly wounded by a Turkish
patrol, and Lawrence finished him off with a pistol so that he wouldn’t fall
into Turkish hands.
What was
going on? First of all, how was he able to do it? Lawrence was in the extremely
unusual position of being able to free-lance anywhere he wanted. He still had
no official position or command responsibilities; it was all in his informal
network, and he could go anywhere in it at any time. And he had all the
resources he needed to move anywhere. He could travel by camel, with his
magnificent escort, or by himself in disguise. It was his reputation to pop up
anywhere, and he did. He could travel by car, order a plane, or hitch a ride
with a pilot who happened to land nearby. At the British end, this was what
they were used to. His visits were always welcome, upbeat; although he played
his role more quietly there (and switched back into his khaki uniform), he had
an aura with the British too, of military advances out beyond the horizon
towards their common goal. Then he was off again.
Second
question: why did he risk himself so much? Just at the time when he was
becoming more successful, when most careers settle into greater responsibility
and organizational routine, Lawrence was becoming reckless.
One
reason was that in fact things were not going well everywhere in his war
zone. During the period from his
triumph at Aqaba in July 1917, until the great offensive launched by Allenby to
break through the Turkish lines in September 1918, results with the Arab Army
in the desert were spotty. This was covered up by his aura, but Lawrence
himself, as a careful observer, certainly knew that his Arab troops often
failed against the Turks, especially when he wasn’t there to lead them
personally. So he took advantage of his enhanced mobility and moved rapidly
from one place to another, always initiating something, always generating some
action.
Why
would he push the envelope, disappearing for weeks at a time, making huge
journeys in the desert, scouting out Turkish strongholds as if he were a low
level native lookout?
A clue
is in conversations he had with a British companion on one of his desert
rides. “... as he told me last
night, each time he starts out on these stunts, he simply hates it for two or
three days until movement, action and the glory of scenery and nature catch
hold of him and make him well again.”
[James 198] His emotional
energy was not always high; it fluctuated. The down times came when he had to
think about the political web he was in; the strain of keeping up his
enthusiasm with Arab leaders like Faisal, hiding his doubts about what the
outcome of the war eventually would be, hiding his doubts about the equivocal
role he was playing in it. As the end came more closely in view, the strain
grew stronger.
Lawrence
always had an escape: action. Out at the forward edge, his Arab followers
pumped him up with charisma. It
was his emotional-energy magnet.
The down times came in the moments of transition, when he had to move
from his British connections back to his Arab network. As he related, there
would be a bad two or three days, feeling the strain of his double life, then
the flow of being the cutting edge of action got him energized again.
Lawrence
became an action junkie, hooked on danger. It was his way of avoiding the fate
of successful leaders, of being trapped upstairs in the formality and the
hypocrisy of power.
It fed
his personal charisma even more.
The height of ambition, the
height of ambiguity
Lawrence
by now was acting contrary to official British policy, and misrepresenting that
policy to Faisal and the Arabs. Why didn’t the British rein him in? Because the
policy that embarrassed the British with their Arab allies was their agreement
to divide up the Middle East with the French. Lawrence as liaison to Faisal had
to keep assuring him that the Arabs would get the independent kingdom promised
them. Presumably Lawrence knew
better, but the only way he could keep operating with the Arabs was to deny
that an agreement with the French existed. One might call this the dirty world
of foreign agents and secret deals; the British needed to have an agent whom
they could let go at arms length. The British probably knew that Lawrence was
out of their control, but this was in their best interest. Whatever Lawrence
said or promised could be denied; just as, out in the desert, whatever the
British diplomats had said could be denied. The arms-length structure was
needed by both links in the chain.
Whoever
plays the bridge between far-flung-- and dynamic-- networks has vast freedom of
action; but also, if there are strong feelings of loyalty, much psychological
strain.
The
regular British army along the coast advanced in slow phases. In December 1917,
Allenby pushed back the Turks in southern Palestine and took Jerusalem. In September 1918, a long-awaited
offensive routed the Turks and sent them retreating in disorder across the
northern hills and into Damascus. The Arab Army’s part of the plan was to cut
off Turkish railroad links, and trap the Turkish army in a bottleneck.
Lawrence’s troops accomplished their part well enough, although the deciding
factor was the massive artillery and aerial bombing Allenby had assembled. The Turks fell back in disarray, just
the kind of target the Arabs were good at attacking, and there was a great deal
of looting and massacring wounded and retreating troops.
Damascus,
according to diplomatic agreement, was slated for the French. They had a small
battlefield contingent, and a colonial base in Lebanon, on the coast west of
Damascus. Nevertheless, Lawrence sensed an opportunity for an Arab coup. He
sent for Faisal to hurry to the front. As Allenby’s liaison, Lawrence was in a
position to know exactly what was happening. He had hoped the Arabs would get
to Damascus first, and get the credit for liberating it; and this would be the
prelude to setting up Faisal as King. But Australian troops from the British
command got to Damascus first; finding the city empty of enemy forces, they
continued on through chasing the fleeing Turks.
Next
morning, Lawrence showed up at the Australian division headquarters and heard
that Damascus was undefended. He immediately got an armored car and had himself
driven into Damascus. At the town hall, there was pandemonium as rival factions
argued over who was the legitimate local government now that the Ottomans had
gone. Using all his charisma, backed up by armed force, Lawrence threw his
choice behind a local supporter of
Faisal’s father. When British and French forces arrived, Lawrence
presented them with a fait accompli: a governor in favor of the Arab Bureau’s
plan, whom he represented as having been elected by the will of the citizens.
For a moment at least, the plan had succeeded.
Game’s up
Next day
Allenby arrived and official reality set in. The diplomatic agreement still
held. Faisal would not get what he had been promised. As a symbolic token, Arab
troops could lead the parade into Damascus, but the Arab governor would be
under French command. Lawrence as liaison to Faisal would henceforth report to
the French. Lawrence immediately asked for leave to go back to England. It was
accepted and his war was over.
His
network bridge was broken.
Reputational networks and the
travails of celebrity
Although
Lawrence was on the losing side of the diplomatic struggle, his reputation was
made. If fame was what he was seeking, he had it. His superiors in Egypt and in
the Army never held anything against him, and lauded his performance (which
implies that they applauded his role as ambiguous go-between). Back in England,
the British elite treated Lawrence as a man to know. His pro-Arab and
anti-French stance had much sympathy at home, but what could be done? Lawrence
attended the Versailles peace conference, continuing to act as Faisal’s
advocate and joining in his entourage. To no avail. Lawrence was not the only
sophisticated participant at the Versailles treaty conference (others included
Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes) who thought its results disastrous. To get
an idea of the tone of the conference, consider that the French Prime Minister,
Clemenceau, proposed to fight a duel with the British PM, Lloyd George, over
the Arab/Syria issue. [Fromkin 289] The Arabs lost again. Lawrence was
photographed again, wearing his Arab robes in Versailles.
In 1922
Lawrence was at another disastrous treaty conference, the Middle Eastern
settlement made in Cairo, which drew the boundaries of the modern Middle East
that have been objects of contention ever since. Lawrence now attended as a confidant
of Winston Churchill. They had their picture taken in front of the Great
Pyramid, just two camels away from each other, along with Gertrude Bell,
another friend of Lawrence from the Arabist circle. Lawrence is back in
civilian clothes, disguised in the black suit of a minor civil servant.
 |
| from left: Churchill, Gertrude Bell, Lawrence 1922 |
From the
time he had arrived back in England in late 1918, Lawrence was a popular media
hero. The American newsman Lowell
Thomas had been sent to Europe to stir up enthusiasm when the US entered the
war in April 1917. Finding nothing
encouraging on the Western front, he went on to the Middle East and heard about
Lawrence’s exploits. In early 1918, Thomas filmed interviews with Lawrence in
his Arab robes. Movie theatres
showing full-length features were just coming into popularity; newsreels were
being invented. Film of Lawrence were shown in the US and Britain in spring
1918. Next year, Thomas launched a
two-hour spectacular in a New York theatre, including film of the Palestine
campaign accompanied by a symphony orchestra (it was the time of silent
movies). Thomas himself gave the narration, playing up his discovery of
Lawrence in the desert. It was the launch of his own career as well; Lowell
Thomas went on to become the first of the new impresarios, like the TV anchors
and interview hosts from that time until today. Thomas took his show to London, where it ran for six months
in 1919-1920.
 |
| Lawrence, Lowell Thomas, 1918 |
All this
was just prior to the frenzy for all things Arab, reaching its height with
Valentino’s 1921 film, The Sheik. For years during the 1920s, American
college boys at dances referred to themselves as “sheiks.”
 |
| Rudolph Valentino, The Sheik, 1921 |
Modern-style
publicity was creating a new phenomenon, the celebrity: not merely someone in
public life, or the old-fashioned nobility taking deference as a matter of
course. The celebrity attracted the attention of crowds and fans, not because s/he
was doing anything, but because of the self-reinforcing effects of media
attention. Lawrence was one of the
first celebrities in the modern sense; and he quickly found he didn’t like it.
Fame and recognition among the Arabs in the desert was one thing; there he
wasn’t a passive recipient of curiosity, but a leader of action. The Arabs who
shouted when he approached surrounded by his bodyguard on camels energized him.
But being recognized on the street, asked for autographs and invited to dinner
parties didn’t energize him; he was just a passive object for others’
curiosity. He began to take
disguises, seeking shelter in country hide-outs, using assumed names.
Being a recluse wasn't what he wanted, but success on his own terms. He had always
had literary ambitions, and now he had an epic topic to write about. His
personal memoir of the desert campaign, Seven
Pillars of Wisdom, was privately circulated in 1922, and published in a
large edition in 1927. It is a beautifully written book, capturing the sight
and feel of the desert, the personalities of the people. It tells Lawrence’s
adventures with self-deprecating modesty, and concludes on the ironic note of
the prize of Arab freedom taken away from them at the end. There is no bragging
and no rhetoric, but Lawrence is always at the center. What is omitted is
crucial for the actual pattern of success: there is no mention of the gold
Lawrence used to buy loyalties in the desert; little mention of the high-tech
weapons Lawrence increasingly relied upon. The narrative is about his movements
with his Arab army, so that an uninformed reader would scarcely know that
Allenby’s regular army carried most of the fighting and broke open the way to
Damascus.
It was
another network triumph for Lawrence as his manuscript circulated among the
literary elite. He became friends with its aging patriarch, George Bernard
Shaw, whose name Lawrence used as one of his pseudonyms, T.E. Shaw. To gather
material for another book, as well as to
escape public attention, Lawrence enlisted in the RAF in 1922 under an
assumed name. In effect, he was seeking further adventures in a foreign land;
but now it was in the underclass of ordinary British soldiers, who almost never
came into intimate contact with the officer class in which Lawrence moved. The
book drawing on his experiences, called The
Mint, is an account of the rough, authoritarian military training camp.
Lawrence himself thought it was a better book than Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but it was never popular. Because it was
virtually the first book to record the obscene language of ordinary working
men, it was regarded as offensive and never published in his lifetime. His
adventure in the social class underground could not keep up the level of his
adventure as network bridge and charismatic leader in Arabia.
Of
course. The moving structures that supported his charisma were not replaced.
Not
surprisingly, in the years after the war Lawrence continued his quest for the
latest technologies of speed. He became enamoured of high-speed motor boats,
which he tested for the navy. He joined the RAF to see the world of planes from
the mechanic’s point of view. He liked fast motorcycles. He was riding one of
them in 1935 when he was killed in an accident. He was 46 years old, recently
discharged from the RAF, his action network behind him.
Charisma without speech-making
We
generally think of charismatic leaders as great speech-makers: Lincoln, Martin
Luther King, Churchill, and even on the dark side of the force, Adolf
Hitler. For most of them, what is
best-remembered are the speeches they made.
But if
the key to charisma is generating high emotional energy in masses of people and
rallying them around oneself, Lawrence shows there is another way to do it.
A
charismatic leader energizes other people, and thereby energizes oneself.
Lawrence did this by talking quietly, observing silently, never giving orders,
waiting his time and then making suggestions that others accepted. Of course
there were other reasons why he was in a position to get attention even with
his quiet style: his unique network bridge, where both ends depended on him alone
to give them something they really wanted; his success in delivering things:
gold, hope for future plans, a growing coalition, victory. His network made
Lawrence.
But also
vice versa. One lesson of
Lawrence’s career is that networks are most powerful when they are dynamic.
Static networks don’t make careers; they certainly don’t generate charisma.
Networks build and contract; and the attracting force that unites them best is
emotional energy. Lawrence had the micro-interactional style to generate EE;
and thus to grow his networks with enthusiasm. He always had the sense to avoid
networks where he lost EE.
Perhaps
we should say, he had that sense most of the time, until the moment he left
Damascus in political defeat.
After that, he kept looking for new networks, but the flashier ones did
little to energize him further; and the more adventurous ones he tried to
substitute just brought him down.
His life
was like an experiment demonstrating the power of networks, high and low.
How charismatic leaders build their careers in war,
politics, or business:
Randall Collins and Maren McConnell. 2015.
Napoleon
Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy.
References
T. E. Lawrence.
1926. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
T. E.
Lawrence. (posthumously published 1973)
The Mint.
David
Fromkin. 1989. A Peace to End All Peace:
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.
Lawrence
James. 2008. The Golden Warrior. The Life
and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia.
Max
Boot. 2013. Invisible Armies. A History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to
the Present.
Bruce
Kuklick. 1996. Puritans in Babylon. The Ancient Near East
and American Intellectuals, 1880-1930.
[on the golden age of archeological exploration]
on
advantages in networks:
Ronald
Burt. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition.
John
Levi Martin. 2009. Social Structures.
Randall
Collins and Mauro Guillèn. 2012. “Mutual
halo effects in cultural production networks.” Theory and Society 41.
