With Lawrence in Arabia Read online

  Copyright © 1924 by Lowell Thomas

  Foreword Copyright © 2017 by Mitchell Stephens

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition Copyright © 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Tom Lau

  Cover photo credit: Lowell Thomas

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1572-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1573-8

  Printed in the United States of America.

  To Eighteen Gentlemen of Chicago

  this narrative of the adventures

  of a modern Arabian knight

  is gratefully dedicated

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE 2017 EDITION

  INTRODUCTION

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 2017 EDITION

  CHAPTER

  I

  A MODERN ARABIAN KNIGHT

  III

  IN SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION

  III

  THE ARCHAEOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER

  IV

  THE CULT OF THE BLOOD OF MOHAMMED

  V

  THE FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA

  VI

  THE GATHERING OF THE DESERT TRIBES

  VII

  THE BATTLE AT THE WELLS OF ABU EL LISSAL

  VIII

  THE CAPTURE OF KING SOLOMON’S ANCIENT SEAPORT

  IX

  ACROSS THE RED SEA TO JOIN LAWRENCE AND FEISAL

  X

  THE BATTLE OF SEIL EL HASA

  XI

  LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER

  XII

  DRINKERS OF THE MILK OF WAR

  XIII

  AUDA ABU TAYI, THE BEDOUIN ROBIN HOOD

  XIV

  KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK TENTS

  XV

  MY LORD THE CAMEL

  XVI

  ABDULLAH THE POCK-MARKED, AND THE STORY OF FERRAJ AND DAOUD

  XVII

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH

  XVIII

  A ROSE-RED CITY HALF AS OLD AS TIME

  XIX

  A BEDOUIN BATTLE IN A CITY OF GHOSTS

  XX

  THE RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE

  XXI

  THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES IN DISGUISE

  XXII

  THE GREATEST HOAX SINCE THE TROJAN HORSE

  XXIII

  A CAVALRY NAVAL ENGAGEMENT AND LAWRENCE’S LAST GREAT RAID

  XXIV

  THE DOWNFALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

  XXV

  LAWRENCE RULES IN DAMASCUS, AND THE TREACHERY OF THE ALGERIAN EMIR

  XXVI

  TALES OF THE SECRET CORPS

  XXVII

  JOYCE & CO., AND THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS OF THE AIR

  XXVIII

  FEISAL AND LAWRENCE AT THE BATTLE OF PARIS

  XXIX

  LAWRENCE NARROWLY ESCAPES DEATH; ADVENTURES OF FEISAL AND HUSSEIN

  XXX

  LAWRENCE FLEES FROM LONDON, AND FEISAL BECOMES KING IN BAGDAD

  XXXI

  THE SECRET OF LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS

  XXXII

  THE ART OF HANDLING ARABS

  XXXIII

  LAWRENCE THE MAN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE 2017 EDITION

  The Explorers Club is pleased to be reprinting With Lawrence in Arabia as part of our classic series. First published in the 1920s, this book, with its unique historical significance, is as exciting now as it was then. We are proud to add it to our collection.

  We want to thank Mitchell Stephens, Lowell Thomas’s biographer, who has contributed a new introduction for this edition. Ted Janulis, President of the Explorers Club, has added comments about Lowell Thomas and his relationship to the Explorers Club.

  A sincere thank you goes to the Lowell Thomas family for granting us permission to reprint With Lawrence in Arabia and for graciously donating the proceeds from the sale of this book to the Lowell Thomas Capital Building Fund. This fund was established in honor of Lowell Thomas, for whom our headquarters building in New York is named.

  A special thanks goes to Anne Donaghy, the daughter of Lowell Thomas, Jr.; Executive Director of the club, Will Roseman; Curator of Collections, Lacey Flint; George Gowen; Leslie Steinau; and Veronica Alvarado.

  Jay Cassell and Skyhorse Publishing continue to collaborate with the Explorers Club in this venture and understand our commitment to republishing outstanding books in the field of exploration.

  Lindley Kirksey Young The Explorers Club 2017

  INTRODUCTION:

  LOWELL THOMAS AND THE BUILDING THAT BEARS HIS NAME

  On East 70th Street in New York City, between Central Park and Park Avenue, you can see a stately Jacobean townhouse with a plaque on its facade, engraved with the words “The Explorers Club.” This five-story mansion house was built in 1910 by art collector Stephen Clark, who donated much of his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Today if you venture inside the building, you’ll find yourself surrounded by a kaleidoscope of artifacts: photos of Buzz Aldrin on the moon and the bathyscaphe Trieste, which ventured for the first time to the deepest part of the ocean in 1960; Matthew Henson’s North Pole gloves, along with some leftover provisions from that remarkable journey; the globe around which Thor Heyerdahl planned his epic Kon-Tiki voyage; the beams from the 1828 British warship HMS Daedalus; and Tudor-rose windows from Windsor Castle.

  If you then ascend the main staircase of the town-house—perhaps to see a film, attend a lecture, or take part in a seminar on the second floor—you will be greeted at the first landing by a bust of Lowell Thomas, for whom our headquarters building is now named in recognition, honoring his critical role in its acquisition from the Clark family. This central positioning is altogether fitting and proper, as Thomas embodied the spirit, mission, and soul of the Explorers Club—to not only explore the worlds around, below, and above us, but to interpret and communicate that newfound knowledge with those back home. This extraordinary man and exquisite storyteller not only had a thirst to learn about our planet’s people, cultures, and creatures, he made these adventures accessible and alluring to vast audiences who are thrilled to follow in Thomas’s footsteps and hear his remarkable tales.

  One of Thomas’s most notable “discoveries,” of course, was T. E. Lawrence. And if you believe that all the great discoveries have been made, that the days of fresh adventure are behind us, please pay close attention to how unexpected the paths and accomplishments of these two men were to their contemporaries. Inspiration for us all!

  Each year, the Explorers Club hosts the Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner in honor of men and women who have achieved excellence in exploration. Many of today’s explorations are under the ocean, in space, in the laboratory, and involving our changing environment.

  Ted Janulis President of the Explorers Club 2017

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 2017 EDIT
ION

  BY MITCHELL STEPHENS

  The legendary story of “Lawrence of Arabia” has now been told in more than a hundred books. Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia, published initially in 1924, was the first.

  With Lawrence in Arabia shares a weakness with just about all those other books about T. E. Lawrence and his adventures in Arabia during the First World War: it underplays Thomas’s own role in bringing Lawrence to public attention and creating the legend that came to surround his activities during the war. Some biographies of Lawrence scrub Lowell Thomas entirely or almost entirely from the story. And this is an oversight that transcends the written word: David Lean’s Academy Award-winning 1962 movie, Lawrence of Arabia, restricts itself to glimpses of a gruff reporter, though Lean’s producer had purchased the rights to Thomas’s book.

  Lowell Thomas, who in fact was not gruff but charming, was the only journalist who actually spent time with T. E. Lawrence in Arabia. Along with the cameraman who accompanied him, Harry A. Chase, Thomas rode camels through the Arabian Desert with Lawrence and Shereef Feisal, leader of the Arab Revolt. He secured firsthand, contemporary accounts of the fighting from many of the principals. He squatted in their tents, ate their food, observed them on their camels and horses, jotted down their accounts of dynamiting trains, and transcribed their own analyses—Lawrence’s in particular—of the past and future of the Middle East.

  The book Lowell Thomas wrote about Lawrence and the Arab Revolt appeared in dozens of editions in a number of languages. Nonetheless, despite possessing the right of primogeniture, despite its thoroughness and success, this book cannot fairly claim to have made Lawrence famous. He was already famous—thanks to Thomas’s show, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.

  That multi-media show—which Thomas brought to London when he was twenty-seven—was the largest triumph so far in what had already been a remarkable, if unfocused, life. Thomas, raised in a gold-rush town in Colorado, had secured two bachelor’s and one master’s degree by the time he was twenty-one. Then he made his way to Chicago to work as a reporter and attend law school and was quickly invited to teach a class in public speaking at that law school. He traveled to Alaska and soon was giving illustrated lectures on Alaska. He enrolled in graduate school at Princeton and after a year was invited to join the faculty.

  At the age of twenty-five, Thomas—still moving forward at a rapid pace, still refusing to stick to any clear career path—set out for Europe and then the Middle East to see what he could make of the First World War. He was in part a propagandist: the United States government had encouraged his efforts to gather news and images of the war, and Thomas had raised the money for his trip from some Chicago investors motivated in part by the desire to increase support for this gruesome and faraway war. (Thomas’s book is dedicated to those investors.) Thomas had also been presenting himself as a journalist, though he published few articles while covering the war, none while in the Middle East. He had with him, in Harry Chase, an expert photographer and film cameraman. They were capturing footage of war and its consequences at a time when such film remained rare.

  And Thomas was well on his way to becoming a master storyteller. His ability to set a scene, sketch a character and build some suspense is well demonstrated in this book by his richly detailed account of an encounter in Jerusalem. Enter T. E. Lawrence—in the guise of a “young Bedouin,” walking toward the Damascus Gate and attired in “magnificent Arab robes.” Or maybe not a “young Bedouin.” “This mysterious prince of Mecca,” Thomas writes, “was as blond as a Scandinavian,” “clean shaven,” with “blue eyes.”

  Thomas had the storyteller’s, the journalist’s, and the propagandist’s eye for good material. He began hearing amazing tales—some told by the man himself—of Lawrence’s adventures riding fast camels across the desert and battling the Turks. Thomas became fascinated with this twenty-nine-year-old British major who sported Arab garb. He managed to secure permission from Lawrence and British officials to visit him in Arabia.

  Thomas and Chase arrived in Aqaba—the Arab Revolt’s most strategic conquest —on March 27, 1918. They spent two weeks in the area—living in tents, riding those camels, photographing, filming, interviewing, observing, reporting. This was at a time—well before the oil frenzy—when for Europeans and Americans Arabia was about as exotic and unknown as anywhere in the world.

  When he finally returned to the United States after the First World War ended, Thomas put together some illustrated lectures on what he had seen during and after the war—travelogues, as they were somewhat loosely called. One of these shows focused on British General Edmund Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem—the historically resonant event that had inspired Thomas to travel to the Middle East in the first place. Another was devoted to the Arab Revolt. A British impresario, Percy Burton, walked into one of those shows in New York and persuaded Thomas to present a combination of the two Middle East shows in London, where interest in a British general and that young British fellow who had played a large role in the Arab Revolt would be strong. Burton secured the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden for Thomas’s travelogue. The show opened there on August 14, 1919, under the name With Allenby in Palestine, Including the Capture of Jerusalem and Liberation of Holy Arabia.

  It has a claim on being the world’s first multimedia show, for Thomas combined his narration with film, slides, music, and dance. The reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, sometimes ecstatic: “What is modestly and prosaically described as ‘an illustrated travelogue’ of the British campaigns in Palestine and Arabia,” the Daily Telegraph exclaimed, “is in reality an heroic epic capable of inspiring a dozen modern emulators of Homer or Plutarch.”

  Long lines formed to get tickets, and soon Thomas was performing his show twice a day in the much-larger Royal Albert Hall. The prime ministers of Britain and France came. The Queen came. Winston Churchill appeared in the audience, as did Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. On more than one occasion Lawrence himself snuck in.

  By then it was clear that the real star of the show was “the mysterious young Englishman who freed Holy Arabia from the Turks.” The production’s name was changed to, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. And a hero was proclaimed. A star, an early media star, was if not born—Lawrence’s accomplishments were impressive even minus Thomas’s hyperbole—then at least elevated. A legend was retailed. The First World War, which had been notably poor at putting forward dashing, gallant, larger-than-life characters, suddenly had one.

  Before Thomas’s show arrived in London, T. E. Lawrence’s name had been known to few outside certain limited military and government circles. Now this complex man with a tangled psyche was suddenly being pursued on the street, hounded in his flat, and assaulted by marriage proposals. He also was being befriended by literati like Shaw, Robert Graves, and E. M. Foster. And his views on the future of the Middle East were being listened to, with consequences we are still living with today. (Lawrence’s buddy Feisal was made ruler of a new country called Iraq.)

  Thomas, and other lecturers he hired, would perform the Lawrence/Allenby show all over the world. But his show also began to be criticized—notably by Lawrence himself, in letters to his old comrades or new friends. Lawrence had been, not uncharacteristically, both thrilled and disgusted by his newfound renown. Initially Lawrence had helped Thomas—first in Jerusalem and Arabia, later in London, where he posed for some new photographs in Arab costume and read over and contributed to some of Thomas’s accounts. But Lawrence was also becoming embarrassed. “You know a Mr. Lowell Thomas made me a kind of matinee idol,” he writes in one letter. In another he complains that “the Arab war was not nearly as silly as he”— Thomas—“makes out.” Then Lawrence adds, somewhat disingenuously, “and I was not in charge of it, or even very prominent.”

  When Thomas’s book was published in 1924, there was lots more to criticize. And the criticism did not stop. The faction of revisionist Lawrence authors—anxious to show
that this Oxford-educated Englishman was something less than the indispensible man, the lonely leader, and something much less than the “Uncrowned King of Arabia” – had found With Lawrence in Arabia to be a ready target. This is not entirely fair.

  Lawrence was not the only recipient of Thomas’s encomiums. Here’s Thomas on Feisal: “His people follow him not through fear, but because they admire him and love him.” And Thomas on the British commander in the Middle East: “Allenby was taking enormous chances, but great men usually do.” Plenty of other Arab fighters and British soldiers are also gushed over in these pages. Still, Thomas does pull out all the stops when it comes to his central character:

  “This youth had virtually become the ruler of the Holy Land of the Mohammedans, and commander-in-chief of many thousands of Bedouin. . . . He united the wandering tribes of the desert, restored the sacred places of Islam to the descendants of the Prophet and drove the Turks from Arabia forever . . . . Lawrence freed Arabia.”

  I think we might conclude, without taking sides in the disputes among Lawrence’s chroniclers, that such characterizations of his role are at the very least overstated.

  There are additional missteps in this book. The pale, beardless T. E. Lawrence would indeed have been a fascinating sight walking toward the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem in his Arab-prince costume. But there is no evidence in Thomas’s journals that he had initially stumbled upon this twenty-eight-year-old British major with an affection for Arab dress on the street. Thomas noted at the time that he was first introduced to Lawrence, instead, in the office of General Ronald Storrs. Like many a good storyteller, especially in those less fact-obsessed days, Thomas had a weakness for embellishment. This did nothing for his reputation among the hundred or so authors who have undertaken the T. E. Lawrence story after Thomas’s version.