Sublime

The forces he led or advised attacked the Medina railway and captured Akaba and ultimately Damascus as well. Even after they linked up with the regular forces pushing east out of the Sinai, Lawrence’s irregulars continued to operate as the right wing of the British Army.165

T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt

Lawrence not only helped lead the Arab Revolt but he also reflected on this group of irregular soldiers and their guerrilla campaign.166 Whereas other campaigns, such as those fought by the Irish or Boers, are remembered through a variety of memoirs, government reports, and histories both official and scholarly, Lawrence’s own writings were—and in

Lawrence’s second element, the “biological,” concerned the components of war, “sensitive and illogical” human beings. Because of unknown human factors, commanders are forced to hold a body of men in reserve as a safeguard, thus stretching thin their other human resources. Lawrence worked to magnify his enemy’s ignorance: “We were to contain the ene

In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell, the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence’s guerrilla tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns’ against elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed Briti