"I Loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To gain you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shinning for me
When I came.
Death was my servant on the road, till we were near
And saw you waiting:
When you smile, and in sorrowful envy he outran me,
And took you apart
Into his quietness.
So our love's earning was your cast-off body,
to be held one moment
Before Earth's soft hands would explore all your face
and the blind worms transmute
Your failing substance.
Men prayed me to set my work, the inviolate house,
In memory of you:
But for fit monument I shattered it unfinished, and now
the little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
In the marred shadow
Of your gift."
- "I imagined that the legend of our greatness would soon fade if the people knew us well, and so always held a little apart in spirit, though not in manner. P:169
- "In the three years of the revolt, the Arabs for joy fired in the air millions of shots, yet by them was never a man killed. Faisal forbade the shooting twenty times, but it was good manners in Arabia, and he could not afford to reprove each new group of adherents as they joined him." P172
- "I rejoiced that we were so nearly in, for fever was heavy on me, and I was afraid that perhaps I was going to be really ill: and the prospect of falling into the well-meaning hands of the tribesmen in such a state was not pleasant. Their only treatment of every sickness was to burn a hole or many holes in the patient's body at some other spot believed to be the complement of the part affected. It was a cure tolerable to such as had faith in it: but torture to the unbelieving, and to incur it unwillingly would be silly, and yet very probable, for the Arabs' good intentions were something as selfish as their good digestions." P190
-"These shepherds were a class apart. For the ordinary Arab the hearth was a university, about which their world passed and where they heard the best talk and news of their tribe, its poems, histories, love tales, law suits and barganings. By such constant sharing in the hearth councils they grew up masters of expression, dialecticians, orators, able to it with dignity in any gathering and never at a loss for moving words. The shepherds missed all this. From infancy they followed their calling, which took them in all seasons and weathers, day and night, into the hills and condemned them to loneliness and brute company. In the wilderness, among the dry bones of nature, they grew up natural, knowing nothing of man and his affairs, hardly sane in ordinary talk, but very wise in plants, wild animals, and the habits of their own goats and sheep, whose milk was their chief sustenance. As they got older they got sullen, and often became dangerously savage, more animal than man, haunting their flocks, and finding the satisfaction of their appetites in them, to the exclusion of more normal affections." P204
-"If one man rode quietly behind another's camel, poked his stick suddenly up its rump, and screeched, it mistook him for an excited male, and plunged off at a mad gallop, very disconcerting to the rider. A second good game was to cannon one galloping camel with another, to crash it into a near tree. If it succeeded either the tree went down (valley trees in the light Hejaz soil were notably unstable things) or the rider was scratched and torn, or best of all he was swept quite out of the saddle, and left impaled on a thorny branch, if not dropped violently on the ground. This counted as a bull, and was very popular with everyone else.
The Bedu were odd people. Sojourning with them was unsatisfactory for an Englishman unless he had patience wide and deep as the sea. They were absolute slaves for their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk, or water, gluttons for sewed meat, shameless beggars for tobacco. Acigarette went round four men in a tent before it was finished, and it would have been intolerable manners to have smoked a whole one through. They dreamed for weeks before and after their rare sexual intercourses, and spent the intervening days titillating themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. Had the circumstances of their lives given them greater resources or opportunity they would have been just sensualists. Their strenghts was the strength of men georgraphically beyond temptation: The poverty of Arabia made them simple, continent, and enduring. If forced into civilised life they would have succumbed like any savages to its deseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice, and like savages they would have taken these diseases in grave and exaggerated form for lack of old inoculation.
If they suspected that we wanted to drive them, either they were mulish, or they went away. If we knew them, and had the time and gave the trouble to represent things to them in a manner which appealed, then they would go to great pains for our pleasure. Whether the results achieved were worth the effort required, no man could tell ... Their processes were clear, their minds moved logically as our own, with nothing incomprehensible or radically different, except the premise: there was no excuse or reason except ignorance whereby we would call them inscrutable or Oriental, or leave them misunderstood." P227-228
-"To combine such people demanded a war-cry and a banner from the outside world, and a stranger to lead them, one whose supremacy should be based on a foundation illogical, undeniable, empiric, which instinct might accept and reason could find no rational basis to deny or approve. Such a basis was the working idea of this army of Feisal's, the conceit that an Emir of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet, a Sherif, was an other worldly dignitary, whom sons of Adam might reverence without shame. This was the binding assumption of the Arab movement: that which gave it unanimity: the imbecile god whose worship was imbecility in us." P248
-"The pair were always in trouble, and of late so outrageous in their tricks that Sharraf the severe had noticed, and ordered and example made of them. All he could do for my sake was to let Daud bear half the ordained sentence. Daud leaped at the chance, kissed my hand and Saad's and ran off up the valley, while Saad laughing told me stories of the famous pair. It seemed they were an instance of boy affection which in the East the lack of female comapnionship made common. They often led as in this case to manlu love of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped counceit, since among the Arabs the warmest were innocent, and, if sexuality entered, the intensity passed into give and take, unspiritual relation, like their marriages. P251
-"Arabs of means rode none but she-camels, since they went smoother under the saddle than the males, and were better tempered, and less noisy: also they were more patient, and would endure to march long after they were worn out, indeed until they tottered with exhaustion and fell in their tracks and died: whereas the coarser males grew angry, and flung themselves down when tired, and from sheer rage would die there unnecessary". P267
-"The Arabs, who usually lived in heaps, suspected some ulterior reason the for the too-great privacy: and to remember this, and to forswear all selfish peace and quite while wandering with them, was one of the least pleasant lessons of the desert war: and humiliating too, for it was a part of pride with us to hug solitude, ourselves finding ourselves to be remarkable men when there was no competition present". P278
-"..., and we had to be circumspect, for the Circassians hated the Arabs, and would have been hostile had they seen us..." P306
-"Circassians were swagering fellows, inordinate bullies in a clear road: but if firmly met they cracked, and so this young fellow was in an unpleasant extremity of terror, offending all our senses of respect." P313
-"The water-spring was a thread of silvery water flowing in a runnel of pebbles across delightful turf, green and soft, and on it we were lying wrapped in our cloaks, wondering about something to eat, and if it were worth preparing:for we were subjects at the moment of the physical shame of success, a reaction of victory when it became cleat that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done." P330
-"In the strange blank sunlight of victory we were scarce able to feel ourselves. We spoke with surprise, sat down emptily, fingered our white skirts, doubtful if we could understand or learn who we were. Other's noise was an unreality, a singing in the ears, dreamlike or as if drowned in deep water. The astonishment of continued life was upon us, and we did not know how to turn the gift to account. Especially for me was it had, since though my sight was sharp I never saw men's features: always I peered for their living truth, imagining for myself the spirit-reality of this or that: and today each man owned his desire, and was fulfilled in it, and became meaningless." P339
-"After Wejh it had been borne in upon me that the Hejaz was was won: After Akaba all of us saw that it was ended. Feisal's army had cleared off its Arabian liabilities, and stood now with its back to the friendly Hejaz; and in alliance with the troops under Allenby, the joint Commander-in-Cheif, contemplated the invasion and conquest, or deliverance, of Syria from the Turks. The successful close of our first campaign opened to us the gate for understanding our second.
The difference between Hejaz and Syria was the difference between the desert and the sown. The problem that faced us was one of character: no less than the change-over from the nomad to the townsman: the learning to become civil. Wadi Musa village was our first peasant recruit, and unless we became peasants too, the movement would go no further.
It was good for the Arab Revolt that so early in its growth this change imposed itself. We had been trying a hopeless thing, labouring to plough the waste lands, to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God, that upas certainty which forbade all hope. Among the tribes our creed and its success could be only like the desert grass - a beautiful swift seeming of spring which, after a day's heat, fell to brown dust. Aims and ideas could be translated into tangibility only by expression in material things. The desert and the desert men were too detached to express the one, too poor in goods, too remote from complexity to carry the other. If we would prolong ourselves we must win into the ornamented lands, to the townsmen and villagers whose roofs and field held their eyes downward and near.
The planning began, as it had begun in Wadi Ais, by a study of the map, and a recollection by myself of the nature of this our battle ground of Syria, as it had stood before the war. Our boundaries on the south were th Maan line, and on the east the nomadic portion of the desert. To the west Syria was limited by the Mediterranean, which made its coasr from Gaza to Alexandretta. On the north, the Turkish populations of Anatolia gave it an end. Within its limits the land was much parcelled up by natural divisions. Of them the first and greatest was longitudinal, caused by the mountains that ran like a rugged spine from north to south, dividing a narrow coastal strip from a wide inland plain. These areas had cimatic differences so marked that they made two countries, two races almost, with their respective populations. The shore Syrians lived in different houses, fed and worked differently, and used an Arabic different in inflexion and intonation from that of the inlanders. They spoke of the interior unwillingly, as of a wild land full of blood and terror.
The inland plain was again subdivided geographically into further long stripes, by its rivers. The valleys of the Jordan, Litani and Orontes were the most stable, most prosperous tillages of the country, and reflected themselves in the natures of their inhabitants. Beyond them, on the desert side, lay the strange shifting populations of the border-land, wavering eastward or westward witht he season, living by their wits, wasted by the brought and locusts, by Beduin raids, and, if these failed them, by their own incurable blood-feuds.
Nature had so divided the country into zones: and man had elaborated nature, and given to her compartments additional complexity. Each of these main north-and-south strip divisions was crossed and walled off artificially into communities mutually at odds. We had to reckon up their classes and causes, to see how best to gather them into our hands for offensive action against the Turks. Feisal's opportunities and difficulties lay in the political complications of the face of Syria, and in our minds we classified and arranged them in geographical order, like a moral map.
In the very north, furthest from us, the language-boundary followed, not inaptly, the coach road from Alexandretta to Aleppo, until it met the Bagdad Railway, and then went up the line to Jerablus on the Euphrates, the norternmost Arab village in the south of this general line, in the sttlements of Turkmon villages north and south of Antioch, and in the Armenians who were sifted in among them.
Otherwise, a main component of the coast population was the community of Ansariya, disciples of a strange cult of a principle of fertility, sheer pagan, anti-foreign, distrustful of Islam but drawn at moments towards Christians by the attraction of their common persecution. The sect was vital in itself, and as clannish in feeling and politics. One Nosairi would not betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever. Their villages lay in patches down the main hills from Missis to th Tripoli gap. They spoke Arabic only, and had lived there since the beginning of Greek letters in Syria. Usually they stood aside from affairs, and left alone the Turkish Government, in hope of reciprocity.
Mixed among the Ansariya were colonies of Syrian Christians, and in the bend of the Orontes had been some firm blocks of Armenians, who could not agree with the Turks. Inland near Harm were settlements of Druses, Arabic in origin, and some Circassians from the Caucasus. These had their hand against all. North-east of them were Kurds, speaking Kurdish and Arabic. settlers of some generations back, who were marrying Arabs and adopting their politics. They hated Christians most, and after them Turks and Europeans.
Just beyond the Kurds existed a few Yezidis, Arabic-speaking, but in thought affected by the dualism of Iran, and in their worship prone to placate the spirit of evil, and warped with an admiration of four crude bronze birds. Christians, Mohammedans and Jews, peoples of revelation, united only to spit upon Yezid. Inland of them stood Aleppo, a town of two hundred thousand people, and an epitome of all these races and religions. Eastward of Aleppo for sixty miles were settled Arabs whose colour and manner became more and more tribal as they were nearer the fringe of cultivation where the semi-nomad ended and the Bedawi began.
A section across Syria from sea to desert, a degree further south, began in colonies of Moslem Circassians near the sea. In the new generation they spoke Arabic, and they were an ingenious race, but quarrelsome, much opposed by their Arab neighbours. Inland of them were districts of Ismailia. These Persian immigrants had turned Arab in the course of centuries, but worshipped among themselves king, Mohammed, who in the flesh was the Agha Khan. They believed him to be a great and a wonderful sovereign, honouring the English with his friendship. They hated Mislems, and looked for the crumbling of the Turks. Meanwhile they were trampled on, and were driven to hide thier beastly opinions under a veneer if orthodoxy. Everyone knew how thin that was. They had signs by which to recognise one another, and, though miserably poor, paid yearly tribute towards the princely living of the Agha.
Beyond them were the strange sights of villages of Christian tribal Arabs, some of semi-nomad habit, under their own sheikhs. They seemed very sturdy Christians, quite unlike their snivelling bretheren in the hills. They lived like the Sunni about them , dressed and spoke like them, and were on the best of terms with them. East of the Christians lay semi-pastoral Moslem communities, and east of them again some villages of Ismailia outcasts, on the extreme edge of cultivation, whither they had retired in search of the peace men would give to them. Beyond were nothing but Beduin.
A third section through Syria, another degree lower down, fell between Tripoli and Beyrout. At first, near thecoast, were Lebanon Christians, for the most part Maronites or Greeks. It was hard to disentangle the politics of the two churches. Superficially one should have been French and one Russian: but a part of the Maronites to earn their living had been in the United states, and had there developed an Anglo-Saxon vein, not the less vigorous for being spurious. The Greek church prided itself on being old Syrian, autochthonous, of an intense localism which might send it in the arms of the Turks rather than endure irretrievable domination by a Roman Power.
The adherents of the two sects were at one un unmeasured slander, when they dared, of Mohammedans and their religion. Such verbal scron seemed to salve their consciousness of inbred inferiority. The families of Mohammedan Sunni lived among the Christians, Arabic-speaking like them, and identical race and habit, except for their less mincing dialect and less parade of emigration and its results.
On the higher slopes of the hills clustered settlements of Metawala, Shia Mohammedans who came from Persia generations ago. They were dirty, ignorant, surly and fanatical, refusing to eat or drink with infidels (holding the Sunni as bad as the Christian) following only their own preists and notables. They spoke Arabic, but disowned in every way the country and people about them. Strength was their virtue, and a rare one in gurrulous Syria. Over the hills were villages of Christian yeomen, living in free peace with their Sunni neighbours, as though they never heard the grumbles of their fellows in Lebanon. East of them were semi-nomad Arab peasantry, and then the open desert.
A fourth section, a degree southward, would have fallen near Acre. There, the in inhabitants from the sea-shore were first Sunni Arabs, then Druses, then Metawala. On the banks of the Jordan valley lived bitterly suspicious colonies of Algerian refugees, facing villages of Jews. The Jews were of varied sorts. Some were Hebrew scholars of the traditionalist pattern: but they spoke Arabic with their neighbours, and had developed a standard and style of living befitting the country while yet better than the Arab ways.
The later-comers among them, many of whom were German-inspired, had introduced strange manners of cultivation, and strange crops, and European houses (erected out of charitable funds) into this land of Palestine, which seemed too small and too poor to repay in kind their efforts but they were at least honest attempts at self-support, and deserve honour, in contrast with the larger settlements of sentimental remittance-men in Jerusalem. Manually, they tended to rely on Arab labour, and the land tolerated them. Galilee did not show the deep-seated antipathy to Jewish colonists and thier aims which was an unlovely featured of the Judean area.
Across the eastern plains (Arabs) lay the Leja, a labyrinth of crackled lava, where all the loose and broken men of Syria had forgathered for unnumbered generations. Their descendants lived there in rich lawless villages, secure both from the Turk and Beduin, and worked out their internecine feuds at leisure. South of them opened the Hauran, a huge fertile land, thickly populated in its western half with Arab peasantry, warlike and as self-reliant and prosperous an element as any in Syria.
East of them were the Druses, Arabic-speaking, but hererodox Moslems, who revered a mad and dead sultan of Egypt, and hated Maronites with a bitter hatred which, when encouraged by the Ottoman Government and the Sunni fanatics of Damascus, found expression in great periodic killings. None the less the Druses were disliked by the Moslem Arabs, and despised them in return: they were at feud with the Beduin, obeyed only their own leaders, and preserved in their mountain fastnesses a hollow show of the chivalrous semi-feudalism in which they had lived in the Lebanon in the days of their great Emirs.
A fifth section in the latitude of Jerusalim would have begun with Germans, and with German Jews, speaking German or German-Yiddish, more intractable even than the Jews of the Roman era, unable to endure contact with others not of their race, some of them farmers, most of them shop-keepers, in the mian the most foreign and uncharitable part of the whole population of Syria. Behind them lay their enemies, the sullen Palestine peasants, more stupid than the yeomen of North Syria, materialist as the Egyptians, and bankrupt.
East of them lay the Jordan depths, inhabited by the charred race of serfs, and across it a group upon group of self-respecting village or town Christians who were, after their co-religionists of the Orontes valley, the least timid examples of their faith in the country. Among them and east of them were tens of thousands of semi-nomad Arabs, holding the creed of the desert, living on the fear and bounty of their Christian neighbours. Down this debatable land the Ottoman Government had planted a long lone of Circassian immigrants. They held their ground only by the sword and the favour of the Turks, to they were necessarily devoted." P355-361
"From Childhood they were lawless, obeying their fathers only from physical fear, and their government later for the same reason: and yet there were few races with the respect of the upland Syrian for customary law. All of them wanted something new, for with their superficiality and their lawlessness was combined a passion for politics, the science of which it was fatally easy for the Syrian to gain a smattering, and too difficult to gain a mastery. They were discontented always with what government they had, but few of them honestly thought out an alternative, and fewer still agreed upon what they needed". P364
"Of water we would not want to carry more than a pint each. The camels needed to drink perhaps every third day, and there was no gain in making ourselves richer than our mounts. Some of us never drank between wells, but those were hardy men: most drank fully each well, and carried a drink for the intermediate dry day. In the summer the Arab camels would do about two hundred and fifty miles after a watering: and this would be three days' vigorous march. An easy stage was fifty miles: eighty was good: in an emergency we might do one hundred and ten miles in the twenty four hours. Twice I did one hundred and fourty-three, alone on the Ghazala, Wells were seldom a hundred miles apart, so the pint-radius was more than we really needed.
Our six week's food would give us capacity for a thousand miles out and home ,which would be, like the water-figure, more than ever we required. The endurance of our camels made it possible (for me, the camel-novice in the army, 'painful' would be the fitter word) for us to ride fifteen hundred miles in thirty days, without ever a fear of starvation however much ew exceeded in time, since each of us sat on two hundred pointed of potential meat. If food lacked, we halted and ate our worst camel. Probably it would be poor eating, but fat camels were precious, since our power depended on the number we had. On the march they had to exist on grazing, and after each raid they would be worn thin, and be sent to pasture for some months' rest, while we called out a relay tribe, or found some fresh animals.
The equipment of the raiding parties should aim at simplicity, with nevertheless a technical superiority over the Turks in the most critical department. I sent to Egypt demands for great quantities of light automatic guns, Hotchkiss or Lewis, to be used not as machine-guns but as repeating rifles, sniper's tools. The men should be kept deliberately ignorant of their mechanism, so that the speed of action be not hampered by efforts at repair. We should fight battles of minutes, at eighteen miles an hour. If a gun jammed, the gunner should throw it aside and go on with his rifle. So we would not lavish ammunition: and this would deliver us from le-camels. On the saddle could hand an automatic and a rifle and a hundred cartridges, supplies for at least two actions. We would sleep in our cloaks, with perhaps a blanket for luxury. All depneded on our riding light." P:369-370
"...It was sometimes humiliating to find that wide reading and thinking, book-experience of all countries and ages of the world had yet left in us prejudices like those of washerwomen, and no such verbal ability as theirs in getting on terms with strangers. The English in the Middle East divided into two great sorts: one, a subtle insinuating type, studied and seized the characteristics of the people of the country about them. They adapted themselves to their speech, to their conventions of thought, every often almost to their manner. They directed the people to their own courses, gliding them almost without touch unto the lines they would have. They held a frictionless habit of influence in which their own nature hid, unnocticed.
The other type was the John Bull of the book, who became the more rampantly English the longer and further he was away from England. On the end he invented and Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues so splendid in the distance that when at length he did return he found the reality a sad falling off, and often withdrew his muddle-headed self into a fractious advocate of the good old times. Abroad he was a rounded sample of our traits, a deep influence on his surroundings, through his armoured certainty. He showed them how individual and complete Englishman could be, and while there was friction in his track, and his direction was less smooth than that of the intellectual type, yet it looked as though his example, being cleaner-cut, was more conspicuous, and his effect wider.
Both sorts agreed in the direction of this example, one by assent, the other by implication. Each in this way assumed the Englishman a chosen being, inimitable. They felt the copying him a kind of blasphemy, or at least an impertinence to be put down with the contemptuous name of fraud. In this conceit they urged on their people the next best thing. God had not given it to them to be English; therefore their duty remained to be as good of their own type as possible. Consequently we admired native dress, studied their language, wrote books about their architecture, their folklore, their dying industries." P382
"...I laid aside my purpose in order to gain ground with Auda, and began to jeer at the old man, provokingly, for being so old and yet so foolish like the rest of his race, who regarded our comic reproductive processes not as merely an unhygienic pleasure, but as a main business of life.
He retorted with his desire for children, and I asked him if he had found life good enough to thank his parents for bringing him into it or wantonly to confer the doubtful gift upon an unborn spirit? ... but he maintained himself. 'Indeed, I am Auda,' said he firmly 'and you know Auda. My father (God be merciful to him) was master, and greater than Auda, and he would praise my grandfather. So indeed the world gets greater as we go back". P385
"We waited that day, and all the night. At sunset a scorpion scuttled out of my saddlebags under the bush by which I had lain down to make note of the day's weariness, and fastened on my left hand and stung me - it seemed repeatedly. The pain was very great, and my arm swelled up, and kept me uneasily awake until the second dawn. It checked thought, and so was a not unwelcome relief to my overburdened mind, for seldom was the body clamant enough to interrupt my self-questioning, and then only by the help of some surface injury sweeping all the sluggish nerves like fire.
Nor did pain of this quality ever endure long enough really to be a cure. On this occasion, after distracting me for the night, it gave way to that unattractive and not honourable internal ache which, after a little, in itself provoked thought, and left me yet weaker to endure it unharmed. In such conditions the war seemed to me a folly as great as the crime of myself and my pretensions into his puzzled hands when the watched announced the train". P419-20
"To have shown in an unguarded statement, or by direct question, ignorance of such matters would have been fatal to me, for every competent Arab was familiar with them by instinct or experience. In the small and little-people desert every worshipful man knew every other, and instead of books they studied their own generation. To have fallen short in this knowledge would have meant being branded either as ill-bred, or as a stranger, and strangers were not admitted to familiar intercourse, and were shut out from councils and friendly confidences. There was nothing so wearing in all Arabia as this constant mental gymnastic of apparent omniscience at each time of meeting a new tribe. An effort to grasp unknown allusions, and to take an intelligent share in a half-intelligible conversation, would be hard in England, where only politeness was at stake, but how much more in the Arab Revolt, where one had failure not merely in etiquette or in imagination, but in understanding a new dialect, might have wrecked the whole endeavour." P457
- "To be of the desert was to wage unending battle with an enemy who was not the world or life or anything, but hope itself, and failure seemed God's freedom to mankind. We might only exercise this our freedom by not doing what it lay within our power to do, for then life would belong to us, and we would have mastered it by holding it cheap. Death would seem best of all our works, the last liberty within our grasp, our final leisure: and of these two poles of our being, death and life, or rather leisure and subsistence, we should shun subsistence (which was life) in all save its faintest degree, and cling close to leisure. so we would serve the not-doing rather than the doing.
Some men there might be, uncreative, whose leisure would be barren: but they activity of these would have been material only, and better they did nothing than just tangible things. If our purpose in the world was to bring forth immaterial things, things creative, partaking of our spirit, not our flesh, then we must be jealous of our physical demands, since in most men the soul grew aged long before the body. Mankind had been no gainer by its drudges.
There could be no honour in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeated. Omnipotence and the Infinite were our two worthiest foemen, indeed the only ones eligible for a full man to meet, for they were monsters of out own minds' making, and the stoutest enemies were of the household. In fighting Omnipotence, honour was to throw away the poor resources that we had, and dare Him empty-handed, to be beaten not merely by more mind, but by the better tools. To the clear-sighted, failure was the only goal to seek. We must believe through and through that there was no victory, except to go down into death fighting and crying for failure itself, calling in excess of despair to Omnipotence to strike harder, that by His every striking He might temper our tortured selves into the weapon of His own ruin.
This was a halting, half-coherent speech, struck out desperately moment by moment in our extreme need, upon the anvil of those white minds round of the dying fire, and hardly its a sense remained with me afterwards; for once my picture-making memory forgot its trade, and only felt the slow humbling of the Serahin, the night-quiet in which their worldliness faded, and at last their new flashing eagerness to ride with us to whatever bourne..."P463
"Abdulla and the Zaagi ruled them, by my authority, with an unalloyed savagery which could only be excused by the power of each man to quit the service if he wished. Yet we had only one resignation. The others, though adolescents full of carnal passion, tempted by their irregular life, well-fed, exercised, rich, seemed to sanctify their feat, to be fascinated by their physical suffering. Servitude in the East was based, like other conduct, on their obsession with the antithesis between body and spirit, and these took pleasure in subordination, in the utter degrading of the body, to throw more into relief the freedom and equality of mind: almost they preferred servitude, as richer experience than authority.
So the relation of master and man in Arabia was at once more free and more subject than elsewhere. Servants were afraid of the sword of justice, and of the whip, not because the one might put an arbitrary term to their existence, and the other print red rivers of pain about their sides, but because these were the symbols and the means to which their obedience was vowed. They had a gladness of abasement, a freedom of consent to yield to their masters the last service and degree of their flesh and blood, because their spirits were equal and the contract voluntary. " P:525
"The sacredness of women in nomad Arabia forbade prostitution, and there was no urban population to redeem the lack: while the extreme temperature, the good food, abundance of money, uncertainty of life, and the consequent luxury of dress and behaviour inflamed the never sedate instincts of the Arabs, and drove them into sexual perversities.
While these were voluntary and affectionate they were winked at: for they seemed amateurish when compared with the elaborate vices of oriental cites, or the bestialities of their peasantry with goats and asses. We left the regulation of such thing to public opinion, and in hot climates where nature struck sharply and directly on the little-clothed body, public opinion was sometimes very slow and tolerant. The real danger to my mind, was lest the contagion of example (and with it that still more dreaded physical contagion) spread to the British units. They were a handful of very nice fellows, and normally would have been proof: but in such strangeness nothing was granted, and we felt there might be reason our our fear.
"The Turks should never, by the rules of sane generalship, have ventured back to Tafileh at all. It was pure greed, a dog-in-the-manger attitude unworthy of a serious enemy, just the sort of hopeless thing a Turk would do. How could they expect a proper war when they gave us no chance to honour them? Our morals was continually being ruined by their follies, for neither could our men respect their courage, nor our officers respect their brains." P539
"Nothing in Arabia could be more cutting than a north wind at Maan, and today's was of the sharpest and strongest. It blew through our clothes as though we had none, fixed our hands in claws not able to hold either halter or riding-stick, and cramped our legs so that we had no grip of the saddle-pin. Consequently, when thrown from our falling beasts, we pitched off helplessly, and crashed stiffly on the ground, still frozen brittle in the cross-legged attitude proper to riding.
However, there was no rain, and the wind felt like a drying one, so we held on steadily to the north. by morning we had almost made the rivulet of Basta. This means that we were travelling more than a mile an hour, and for fear lest on the morrow we and our camels would both be too tired to do as well, I pushed on in the dark across the little stream. It was swollen, and the beasts jibbed at it, so that we had to lead the way on foot, splashing through three feet of very chilly water. Over the high ground beyond, the wind buffeted us like an enemy: at about nine o'clock the others flung themselves crying down on the ground and refused to go further.
I too was very near crying, sustained indeed only by my annoyance with their open lamentations; and therefore glad in my heart to yield to their example. So we built up the camels in a phalanx, tails to the wind, and lay between them in fair comfort listening to the driving wrack clashing about us as loud as the surges by night round a ship at sea. The visible stars were brilliant, seeming to change groups and places waywardly between the dark clouds which scudded low over our heads, so we were armed against all evil, and could sleep securely in spite of the mud and cold." P559
"When looked at from this torrid East our British conception of sex, or rather of woman, seemed Scandinavian, due to the cold climate which had in the same way rarefied our faith. In the Mediterranean, woman's influence and supposed purpose were circumscribed, and the posture of men before her sexual. In the West the growth of mind had set them free from that carnal conception: but bodies took longer to adjust, and so the physical power endured, and life became a struggle of reason and nature for the dominance of man.
European women were either volunteers or conscientious objectors in this war to govern men's bodies: whereas in the East it was ended long ago, by an understanding in which women were accorded all the physical: and this world they possessed in simplicity, unchallenged, like the faith of the poor in spirit, They knew the necessity of their physical sphere, and had not to struggle for it, since there was no other open or imaginable for them.
Yet by this same agreement all the things men valued - love, companionship, friendliness - became impossible heterosexually; for where there was no equality there could be no mutual affection. Women became a machine for muscular exercise, satisfying the physical appetite for man: but this psychic side could be slaked only among his peers, and therefore carnal marriage was complemented by spiritual union, a fierce homosexual partnership which satisfied all that yearning of human nature for more than the attraction of flesh to flesh. Whence arose these bonds between man and man, at once so intense, so obvious, and so simple.
We Westerners of this complex century who, monks in our bodie's cells, searched and searched for something unknown which should fill our being full to speechlessness and senselessness, were by the mere effort of our search shut out from it forever. It came to children like these Ageyl, sitting still with their spirits' doors open: stronger than the actors of life. We racked ourselves with inherited remorse for others' flesh-indulgence in our gross birth, striving to pay for it by a lifetime of misery: but our frailty, instinct in, if not itself the very life-blood of purpose, drove us ever upon those momentary happiness by the wayside. So our minds, to let man meet life's overdraft, had invented him a compensated hell, and a ledger-balance of good or evil against a day of judgement." P582
"Joyece alleged the magnificence on parade of the Egyptians - formal men who loved mechanical movement, and who surpassed the British Army in physique, in smart appearance, in perfection of drill. Before the war it had been forbidden to put Egyptian and British troops side by side, for fear of invidious comparison. On the other hand, the Egyptian Army was a conscript army, a mere handful of the best men, picked annually from a huge population, and luxuriously appointed, with an artificial standard, and infinite control, since behind it stood a civil power so organized that a deserter had no escape." P:585
"Otherwise there seemed no formality or discipline, and certainly no subordination. All service was active; they were liable at any moment to be attacked by the Turks: and like, the army of Italy, they recognised the duty of defeating the enemy. But for the rest they were not soldiers, but pilgrims, intent always to go a little further." P586
"In the Army an effort, more or less conscious, was made to persuade the recruit to surrender one half of his will. It was not to impress upon the man merely that his will must always actively second the officer's, for then there would have been, as in the Arab Army and among irregulars, that momentary pause for thought transmission or digestion, for the nerves to resolve the relaying private will into active consequence.
On the contrary, the Army sedulously rooted out this significant pause from its companies on parade. It tried to make obedience an instinct, a mental reflex, following as instantly on the command as thought he motor power of the individual wills had been invested together in the system. It demanded a surrender, for the term of service, of reason and initiative: the making of each soldier, or rather of each subordinate, an empty harp through which the will of the commander-in-chief could blow.
This was well so far as it increased quickness: but the giving to another a blank cheque of one faculty of mind led to danger, if or when that other disappeared. Necessary in the light of morality was the weak assumption that each subordinate had his will-motor not atrophied, but reserved in perfect order, ready at the instant to take over his late superior's office and to direct those now subordinate, in turn, to himself. In theory, as the officers from the general downwards were killed in action, the efficiency of direction passed smoothly down the hierarchy till it vested in the senior of the two surviving privates.
It had the further weakness, seeing men's jealousy, of putting unchecked power in the hands of arbitrary old age and its petulant activity: additionally corrupted by long habit of control, an indulgence which became an obsession and ruined its victim, by causing the death of his subjunctive mood. Also it was an idiosyncrasy with me to distrust instinct, which had its roots in our animality. Sooner or later terror came to every fighting man, on the battlefield: generally because his instinct momentarily overcame his reason. If given time, very many men in a crisis would choose death rather than a failure of duty: but if the stress came suddenly, though there was no telling, yet the majority would fail. Reason seemed to give men something deliberately more precious than fear or pain: and this made me discount the value of peace-smartness as a war education.
For with war a subtle change happened to the soldier. Discipline was modified, or supported, or even swallowed by a moral eagerness of the man to fight and win. This eagerness it was which brought victory in the moral sense, and often in the physical sense of the combat. War was made up of long inactions, of periods of mean activity, and then of a crisis of intense effort which turned the scale. For psychological reasons the generals wished for the least duration of this maximum effort: not because the men would not try to give it - usually they would go on till they dropped - but because each such effort weakened their remaining force. Eagerness of such a kind was nervous, and when present in high power, as with the Arabs of the British, it tore apart flesh from spirit, and overstrained the mind. During the war it obliterated, or much reduced, what had been cares of the individual before it possessed him. Slightings of family, slackening of physical attentions or of laws of conduct followed generally.
After the Armistice its aftermath was seen in the breaking down of States and persons: and thus it proved the sanity of the disciplinary training of our peace-army. To rouse the excitement of war for the creation of a military spirit in peacetime would be dangerous, like the too-early doping of an athlete. Consequently discipline, with its concomitant smartness (implying a measured sense of restrain and pain), took its place. If the soldier did not remain human, in spite of logic and his uniform, these peace-bonds would endure in war, and prevent the eagerness of victory by their automatism: but the British Army on such occasions rose superior to its habit: and the Arab Army, born in the fighting line, had never known a peace-habit, was never faced with problems of maintenance till Armistice-time: and then it failed signally. " P588
"The truth was he [Allenby] cared nothing for our fighting power, and did not reckon us as part of his tactical strength except in talk with me, and that to keep up my spirits." P641
"They used to think me boastful when I said I could do such and such: but I never pretended to do it well - probably not so well as half those who heard me - it was only that I was willing to try.
My confidence was not so much ability to do perfectly, as a preference to botch it somehow rather than let it go by default of these brushers of gentlemen's clothes. In case of need any man could do anything, except a work of art..." P648
"We English, who lived years abroad among strangers, went always dressed in the pride of our remembered country, that strange entity impossible to rationalise or explain, but which had no part with the inhabitants, for those who loved England most, often liked Englishmen least. we idealized our country, so highly that when we returned, sometimes the reality fell too short of our dreams to be tolerable. When away, we were worth more than other men by our conviction that she was greatest, straightest and best of all the countries of the world, and we would die before knowing that a page of her history had been blotted by defeated. Here, in Arabia, in the war's need, I was selling my honesty for her sustenance, unquestioningly." P651
"Seldom had the Zaagi collected so many of his troops together, and he was busy sorting them in Ageyl fashion, centre and wings, with a poet on the right and a poet on the left, among the best singers. So that our ride was musical. It hurt him that I would not have a banned, like a prince.
I was on my Ghaza, the old grandmother-camel, now again magnificently fit, though her baby had lately died and her milk was dried up. Abdulla, who rode next to me, had skinned the little carcass, and carried the dry pelt behind the saddle, like a crupper piece. We started well, thanks to the Zaagi's chanting, but after an hour or two, when we were again in Wadi Itm, the Ghazala lifted her head high, and began to pace slowly and uneasily, picking up her feet like a sword-dancer.
I tried to urge her: but Abdulla dashed up alongside me, swept his cloak about him, and sprang from his saddle, holding the calf's skin in his hand. He lighted it with a splash of gravel in front of my camel, who had come to a standstill, gently moaning. On the ground before her he spread the little hide, and whimpering once, strode forward, as firmly as ever. Several times in the day this happens: but afterwards she seemed to forget. " (P653)
"Yet I scarcely hoped it [death], not from fear, for only a deep man could grow deep fear, and I was too tired to be very much afraid: nor from scruple, for our lives had seemed to me the only things absolutely our own for us to keep or give away at will: but from habit, for lately I had risked myself only when it seemed profitable to the Arab cause, and this rule tore to pieces my instinct to end life now.
I was busied compartmenting-up my mind, finding instinct and reason as ever at strong war. Instinct said 'kill', but reason said that was only to cut the mind's tether, and loose it into freedom: better to seek some mental death, a slow wasting of the brain to sink it below these puzzlements. An accident would be more regretted than a deliberate fault: and if I did not hesitate to risk my life, why fuss to dirty it? Yet life and honour seemed in different categories, not able to be sold for one another: and for honour, had I not sold that I year ago, when for the best motive I assured the Arabs that England always kept her plighted word? Or was it like the Sibyl's Book, the more that was lost, the more precious the little that was left? Its part equal to the whole?
My self-secrecy had left me no arbiter of my responsibility. Mind-hunger could be allayed by drawing from others that converse and frictions of ideas to light up our darkness: or by seeking within, where we could meet some needs by introspection, feeding upon ourselves, and even more, upon our bodies, drawing a perfect nourishment from all our pains, which became so many satisfactions to the mind looking inward. My trouble was a debauch of physical work, yet leaving a craving for it, while this everlasting doubt, and the questioning, bound my mind up in a giddy spiral, and left me never space for my own thinking." P653
"we wanted no rice-converts, and persistently refused to make our abundant and famous gold bring over those not spiritually convinced. The money was a confirmation: mortar, not building stone. To have bought men would have been quick and cheap, and nasty; would have put our movement on the base of interest, without other mixture in their motives than human weakness. Even I, the stranger, the godless fraud inspiring an alien nationality, felt a delivery from the hatred and eternal questioning of self in my imitation of their complete bondage to the idea: and for one to be comfortably surrendered, other must surrender too.
A difficulty for me was the lack of instinct in my own performance. I could not for long deceive myself, and my eyes would open: but still my part was worked out so flippantly that none but Joyce and Nesib and Mohammed el Deheilan seemed to know I was acting. To man-instinctive, anything believed by two or three had a miraculous sanction to which their individual ease and life might honestly be sacrificed. To man-rational, wars of nationality were as much a cheat as religious wars, and nothing was worth fighting for: while life was so deliberately private that no circumstances could justify one laying violent hands upon another's:- though a man's own death was his last free-will, a saving grace and measure of intolerable pain; and earlier complaint was only a weakness for mother-comfort, like a child's whining." P657
"Our resources in suffering seemed greater than our capacity for gladness. Both emotions were in our gift, for our senses like a philosopher's stone, changed pain into joy, happiness to shame, instantly. The rejoicing which passed to infinity transformed its nature and became painful, while infinite suffering brought death, out crowning mercy, in its train.
Our pain was full of eddies, confusing its purity. A reef on which many came to shipwreck was the use of flesh in the redemption of others, the fancy that our endurance might win joy, perhaps only for our tormentors, perhaps for all a race. Such false investiture bred a hot though transient satisfaction, in that we felt we had cheated ourselves to ourselves, assumed another's pain or experience, his personality. It was triumph, and a mood of enlargement; we had avoided ourselves, conquered our geometrical completeness, and snatched a momentary 'change of mind'.
Yet in truth we had borne the vicarious for our own sakes, or at least pointed to our own benefit: and could escape from this knowledge only by a make-believe in sense as well as in motive. The self-immolated victim profited first of all himself. He took for his own the rare gift of sacrifice, and no pride and few pleasures in the world were so joyful, so rich, as this choosing voluntarily the evil that might have fallen to others. It was required to perfect a man, and the was a hidden selfishness in this, as in all perfections. "P:660
"To suffer in simplicity for another gave a sense of greatness, of super-humanity. There was no such loftiness as a Cross from which to contemplate the world. The pride and exhilaration of it were beyond conceit. Yet each one occupied, robbed the late-comers of all but the poor part of copying: and the meanest of things were those done by example. The virtue of sacrifice lay within the victim's soul.
Honest redemption must have been free and child-minded. When the expiator was conscious of the under-motives and the after-glory of his act, both were wasted on him. So the introspective altruist appropriated a share of worthless, indeed harmful, to himself, for had he remained passive his cross might have been filled by an innocent person. Today, natural man had grown so complicated that this was the general case: and so the truly heroic might be let the ignorant assume the need of sacrifice in all sincerity, and by it gain the virtue of atonement played to the death, in the belief that it was for the general good.
To rescue simple ones from such evil by paying for them his complicated self would be futile or avaricious for the modern man. He, thought-riddled, could not share their belief in others' discharge through his hanging nailed in agony, and they, looking on him without understanding, might feel the shame which was the manly disciples' lot: or might fail to feel it, and incur the double punishment of ignorance.
Or was this shame too a self-abnegation, to be admitted and admired for its own sake? How was it right to let men die because they did not think or understand? Blindness and folly aping the way or right were punished more heavily that purposed evil, at least in the present consciousness and remorse of man-alive. Complex m[e]n, who knew how self-sacrifice uplifted the redeemer and cast down the bought, and who held back this knowledge, might so let a foolish brother take the place of false nobility and its later due of heavier sentence. There seemed no straight walking for us leaders in this crooked lane of conduct, ring within ring of unknown shamefaced motives cancelling or double-charging their precedents." P661
"I begged him not, like his father, to trust our promises - though one could not know if Hussein trusted us out of stupidity or out of craft - but to trust in his own performance and strength, a justification, by holding, of his right to hold.
Feisal, a reasonable and clear-eyed statesman, accepted my point of view as the normal between nations, and his conviction of the hollowness of promises and gratitude did not sap his energy. Yet I did not dare to take so frankly into confidence the other men in our movement, and they found the cheerfulness of Feisal and myself under the blows of Sykes-Picot agreement rather odd.
Fortunately, at this juncture this British Government in its joyous fashion gave with the left hand also. They promised to the Arabs, or rather to an unauthorised committee of seven Gothamites in Cairo, that the Arabs should keep for their own. Here was a new touchstone for the Syket-Picot treaty, liable, if the war went as we hoped, to make parts of it look patchy. At least it made it all provisional, and the glad Arabs circulated the new word over Syria.
To help downcast Turks, and to show us that its as many hands as an ape's were ignorant of what one another did, and that it could give as many promises as there were parties, the British at once countered documents A to the Sherif, B to their allies, C to the Arab Committee, with document D to Lord Rothschild, a new power, who was promised something equivocal in Palestine. Old Nuri Shaalan, wrinkling has wise face, returned to me with his file of documents, asking in puzzlement which of them all he might believe. As before I glibly repeated, 'The last in date', and the Emir's sense of the honour of his word made him see the humour. Ever after he did his best for us, only warning me, whenever he failed in a promise, that he had superseded it by later intention." P667
"With men I had a sense always of being out of my depth. This led to elaboration, the vice of amateurs tentative in their arts. As my was was overwrought and overthought, because I was not a soldier, so my activities was overwrought, because I was not a man of action. In such outward spheres there was lacking to me the habit of mind to make them second nature. On the contrary, they were intensely conscious efforts, with my detached self always eyeing the performance from the wings in a spirit of criticism.
When there were added to this attitude the cross-strains of hunger, fatigue, heat, or cold, and the beastliness of living among the Arabs, the hysteria of my campaigns might be understood, and excuse made for the double-hysteria of my record of it. Instead of facts, details, and figures, my notebooks were full of states of mind, the reveries and self-questioning induced or deduced by our situations, expressed in abstract words to the dotted rhythm of the beat of camels' marching. The narrative hid in faint sentences, scattered through pages of opinion. Of course my diary had to be something not harmful to others if it fell into enemy hands: but even making this allowance it showed clearly that my interest lay in myself, not in my activities, and four-fifths of it were useless for the rewriting."P679
"I was very concious of the bundle of powers and entities within me: it was their character which hid itself. There was my craving for being liked:- so strong and nervous was it that never could I open myself to another, to make him my friend. The terror of failure in an effort so important had frightened me from trying; and besides there was the standard, for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons. " P:679
"There was a craving for being known and famous, and a horror of being known to like being known. My contempt to my passion for distinction had me refuse every offered honour. I cherished my independence almost as a Beduin did, but found I could realise it best by making another remark upon it, in my hearing. My impotence of vision showed me my shape best in painted pictures, and only the oblique overheard remarks of others and oversee myself was my assault upon my own inviolate citadel.
The lower creation I avoided, as an insult to our intellectual nature. If they forced themselves on me I hated them. To put my hand on a living thing was degradation to me: and it made me tremble if they touched me or took too quick an interest in me. This was an atomic repulsion, the power which guarded the intact course of a floating snowflake: but the opposite would have been my choice, if my head had not been tyrannous. I had a longing for women and animals, and lamented myself most when I saw a soldier hugging a girl in silent ecstasy, a man fondling a dog: because my wish was to be as superficial and my gaoler held me back.
Always the feelings and the illusion were at was within me, reason strong enough to win the victory, but not strong enough to annihilate the vanquished, or to refrain from liking them the better: and perhaps the truest knowledge of love was indeed to love what Self despised. Yet I could only wish it: could see happiness in the supremacy of the material, and could not surrender to it: could try to put my mind to sleep, that suggestion might blow through me freely, and could only remain bitterly awake.
I liked things beneath me, and took my pleasures, and my adventures, downward. There seemed a level of certainty in degradation, a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal point beneath which he could not fall. It was a solid satisfaction on which to rest. The force if things, years and an artificial dignity denied it me more and more, but there endured the after taste of a real liberty from one youthful submerged fortnight in Port Said, coaling steamers by day with other outcasts for three continents, and curling up by night, to sleep on the breakwater by de Lesseps, with the sea surging past my head. "P:680
"So extravagant an estimate of my Chief was partly as a refuge against the meanness of our enemy. The Turks were too-poor creatures for me to fight. Admiration of a beaten enemy had always in it something of the infect; admiration of the Turks would have been blatant self-praise, worthy of regard only if done consciously, to produce nausea in the hearers. Then it might have been that finest modesty which sought a bad impression, which have been that finest modesty which sought a bad impression, which denigrated itself by raising unwilling sympathy for the too-cheapened vanquished.
To hear other people praised made me despair jealously of myself, for I took it at its face value: whereas had they spoken ten times as well of me, I would have discounted it to nothing. I was a standing court-martial on myself, inevitably, because to me the inner springs of action were bare, with the knowledge of how much was just exploited chance. The creditable must have been thought out beforehand, foreseen, prepared, worked for. It was a revenge of my trained historical faculty upon the evidence of public judgement - judgement which was always wrong, to those who knew, but from which there was no appeal, because the world was wider. Indeed having helped to produce history bred in me a contempt for our science, seeing that its materials were as faulty as our private characters, which supplied them." P:683
"We noted again how easy their lives were, the soft body and the unexhausted sinews leaving the brain free to concentrate itself upon a work of which the fiercest might be done in an armchair. In those days, ours had been day-and-night effort for both brain and body, only lying down for the stupor of an hour's sleep in the flush of dawn, and the flush of sunset, the two seasons of the day through which the Arabs found it unwholesome to ride. For the rest it had been twenty-two out of the twenty-four hours in the saddle, each taking it in turn to lead the way through the dark hours to the chill before dawn, while the others let their heads nod forward over the pommel in nescience." P:705
"But these others were really soldiers, a novelty to me, the first met in two years, and it came upon me freshly how the secret of uniform was to make solid, dignified, impersonal, a crowd: to give it something of the singleness and tautness of the upstanding man. This death's livery veiled its bearers from ordinary life, was sign that they had sold themselves to the State for wages; and that in the great game which States every played with death, some few of these their servants would at times be lost. Such were the hazards of their hire.
They had contracted themselves into a service none the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary, some of them obeying the instinct of lawlessness, some because they were hungry: others thirsting for glamour, for the supposed colour of military life: and all of those only received satisfaction who had sought to degrade themselves, for to the peace-eye they were fallen below humanity. Only women with a lech were called by those witnessing clothes: their pay, beneath the dignity of any labourer, was enough only to let them drink sometimes, and forget.
Convicts had violence put upon their bodies: but the soldier assigned his owner the twenty-four hours' use of his flesh, and the conduct of his mind and passions. A convict had licence to hate the rule which confined him (and all humanity outside himself, if he were greedy in hate); but the sulking soldier was a bad soldier, indeed not a soldier. His very affections became hired pieces on the chess-board of living. He might love only the friends of the King his paymaster, fight only His enemies. Some even of the instincts remaining free to slaves he must renounce to be a true soldier - his opinions." P:788
"Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal's new duty would be to rid himself of his war-friends, and to take up with those elements that had been most useful to the Turkish government. His administrative performance would depend on his understanding of this, and on the degree to which he achieved it. Nasir was too little a political philosopher to feel it, much less to say it. Nuri Said knew, and Nuri Shaalan knew: but neither could take the first steps towards it. Those fell on me." P:799
"..From a little mosque, quite near, there was one who cried into my open window, a man with a ringing voice of special sweetness, and I found myself involuntarily distinguishing his words: 'God is great: I testify there are no gods: but God: and Mohammed the Prophet of God. Come to prayer: come to security. God alone is great: there are no gods: but God.'
At the close he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking level, and very softly added: 'And He is very good to us this day, O people of Damascus.' The clamour beneath him hushed suddenly, as everyone seemed to obey the call to prayer for this first night in their lives of perfect freedom: while my fancy showed me, in the overwhelming pause, my loneliness and lack of reason in their movement: since only for me, of the tens of thousands in the city, was that phrase meaningless.
I had been born free, and a stranger to those whom I had led for the two years, and tonight it seemed that I had given them all my gift, this false liberty drawn down to them by spells and wickedness, and nothing was left me but to go away. The dead army of my hopes, now turned to fact, confronted me, and my will, the worn instrument which had so long frayed our path, broke suddenly in my hand and fell useless. It told me that this Eastern chapter in my life was ended. There was the morrow and the next day of unrelenting care, that Faisal might surely gain the fruits of battle: and that was all my work. Or was it just a dream from which I would awake again in the saddle, with before me other months of effort, preaching, risk?" P:802
"The interview [with Allenby] lasted only a few minutes, and when Feisal had gone I made to Allenby the last (and also I think the first) request I ever made to myself - leave to go away. For a while he would not have it, but I reasoned, pointing out how much easier the New Law would be, if my spur were absent from the people. In the end he agreed, and then at once I knew how much I was sorry." P:811
"Throughout, my strongest motive had been a personal one, omitted from the body of the book, but not absent, I think, from my mind, waking or sleeping, for an hour in all those years. Active pains and joys flung themselves up among my days like towers: but always, refluent as air, this persisting hidden urge reformed and became a very element of life: till near the end. It was dead before we reached the town." P:812
"Not the light that was quenched for us, nor the deeds that were, Nor the ancient days,
Nor the sorrows not sorrowful, nor the face most fair Of perfect praise". P:813
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