The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1927 A STRANGE FELLOW

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 206, 19 November 1927, Page 8

The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1927 A STRANGE FELLOW

LAWRENCE OF 1 ARABIA”: There is the mystery of the East in the title. Ancl familiarity will never rob it of its magic. For its possessor is like the hero of some fairy tale, or a reincarnated Crusader, perhaps even a survival of a desert adventurer in the days and nights of Haroun el Raschid. The latest story in our cable news yesterday about this unique nation-maker is typical of the strange man. Colonel T. E. Lawrence has always been as elusive as the reflection of the moon in a running stream. Before the World War, a shy, inquisitive archaeologist; in the war, a Bedouin leader, a daring soldier, the “uncrowned King of Arabia”; after the conflict, the creator of the Hedjaz Kingdom; next, following on the peacemakers’ disillusionment of gallant soldiers, a mechanic in the Royal Air Force, with enough pride left to refuse the offer of a lancecorporal’s stripe; that, and ever so much more than all that, is Lawrence of Arabia. “What’s become of Waring?’* To-day, with all dreams dissipated like soap-bubbles in a breeze, Private Lawrence is a sweating nobody in a lonely outpost on the North-west frontier of India. “Yes, I want to get into the R.A.F., as a private, of course. It’s less trouble—one has nothing to think about.” What can one make of so strange a fellow? No wonder he is inexplicable to the phlegmatic English. The Lawrences of the Empire are beyond conventional understanding. The astonishing career of this little man, quite insignificant until his intensely blue eyes flash the light of a rare personality, would fill many volumes. He has himself written almost a million words about his epic adventures, but without saying much concerning the manner in which he won the confidence of a Bedouin race, ate salt with its Princes, reived Turkish camps with its bandits, rode in the centre of a personal bodyguard of the worst cut-throats and bravos of Arabia, earned the title of El-Orens (“wrecker of trains”), raised and rallied to the British standard warrior tribesmen from Mecca to Bagdad, and remained throughout a hundred forays and fierce encounters, as he remains still to-day, a baffling, loyable, legendary hero of a romantic national renaissance. He is a great man with an exasperating kink for contrariety and secretive ways of achievement.

Lawrence’s first epic story, running to 400,000 words, was written in six months, but a dexterous thief stole the manuscript from him at an English railway station—a scurvy trick to play on an Oxford Bedouin who, for years, had lived unrobbed with desert rogues whose swords would slit an alien or an infidel throat for a peck of flour or a pomegranate. The manuscript was never recovered, and the author had to rewrite the great story. This book, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” was first published in an edition de luxe at thirty guineas a copy. It cost the author a heavy loss in money. A revised public edition reimbursed him, but he would take no royalties from his epic boob. These were turned into a trust for the benefit of the Royal Air Force Memorial Fund. “I don’t want to have to bother about money,” he explained with transparent sincerity—a strange, indeed, a very strange fellow!

Such is the capricious nature of the archaeologist-soldier who, when “fed up” with the tabulated nonsense of the brass-hats, “wangled” leave from Cairo, strolled into the desert, penetrated to the Emir Feisal’s camp, organised the Arab rising against the Turk, and led a conquering nomadic army from Medina to Damascus where, at I:he close of a marvellous career, but not yet known in the Street that is called Straight, an Australian officer booted him for a disreputable ragamuffin. It was a donkey’s kick. It has been said that Lawrence is a great man whose personality runs away with its owner. Perhaps it does, but it captured the flinty hearts of sun-bitten sheiks and made loyal brothers and bondslaves of their fierce tribesmen. This is the strange fellow with whom, by the way, at the Peace Conference in Paris, the late Mr. Massey, a bosom friend almost at first sight, turned down an empty glass on occasions in the glittering foyer of the Hotel Majestic. New Zealand’s Prime Minister then, because of his open honesty and lack of pretence, was one of very few among the peacemakers who heard from ironic lips splendid tales of desert lore and life, heard many a denunciation of the political drift from the Arabs to the new Zion. And to-day Lawrence of Arabia mends airplane wings in a camp overlooking the inhospitable country of the AJridis. England has raised some queer heroes.