T. E. Lawrence
T. E. Lawrence helped organise the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, and spent the rest of his life trying to disappear. Born in 1888 in Wales, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish baronet who had left his wife for the family governess, he read history at Oxford, walked a thousand miles through Ottoman Syria at twenty-one surveying crusader castles, and excavated at Carchemish for the British Museum before the war. He knew the country and the language, which is why intelligence in Cairo took him. The revolt began in 1916 under Sharif Hussein of Mecca, on British promises about postwar Arab independence that the government had already contradicted in the Sykes-Picot agreement with France. Lawrence attached himself to Hussein's son Feisal and argued for a strategy that suited the forces available: not to take Medina but to leave its garrison in place and cut the Hejaz railway that supplied it repeatedly, so that Ottoman troops were tied down guarding a line rather than fighting. He crossed the Nefud desert with about fifty men and took Aqaba from the landward side in July 1917, which nobody had thought possible. He was captured at Deraa in November 1917 and, by his own account, beaten and raped. He went to the peace conference with Feisal and got nothing he had promised. He enlisted in the RAF as an aircraftman under an assumed name, wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and was killed on a motorcycle in Dorset in 1935. The borders drawn at Versailles are the ones the region has been arguing about ever since.
- Lived: 1888 CE – 1935 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: intelligence_officer, guerrilla_leader, writer
