Part Three: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Robert tells Margaret how to scientifically shatter a bridge the T. E. Lawrence way, and how Lawrence crippled the transportation infrastructure of a mighty empire using some guys with camels and sacks of flour. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh.

• 0:07Robert Evans?

  What? I don't even know. I don't even know. It's like three days before the election.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I had a milkshake.

• 0:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  You looked so happy when you were drinking it, though.

• 0:17Robert Evans?

  Tired.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, it's great.

• 0:19Robert Evans?

  Tired of everything, my everyone.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  I know. I'm wearing a hoodie.

• 0:23Robert Evans?

  Huzzah.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'm wearing a hoodie, you guys.

• 0:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Good stuff.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  Good stuff. So.

• 0:38Robert Evans?

  How's, uh, how's everyone doing? How's, how are y'all feeling?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  The aforementioned high on sugar.

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I'm, uh...

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Great.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  I've, I've worked out really hard today, so I'm a little sore. That's okay.

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  I worked out a bit. I need to finish after this. But you know who never works out, Margaret?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Uh, colonialism, it never works out.

• 1:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, that's true. And I mean, also, none of the people in this podcast episode work out anymore because they're all, they've all been dead for decades.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  Because we're talking about World War I. Yeah. There we go. That more or less worked.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17Speaker 03

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• 2:28Robert Evans?

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• 3:30Robert Evans?

  When we last left our friend Lawrence, he had just met Aouda Abu Tayi of the Hawtata tribe. And Faisal and Aouda had decided that with Lawrence's help, they were going to make an attack on the city of Akaba from the north. Now, this is kind of like the major central like action scene. It is beautiful in the movie. They they've they shoot it as this absolutely gorgeous like cavalry charge. And the gist of what's happening here is that Akaba is this port city. It's got a bunch of guns that are trained on the sea. And after the disaster that had been, you know, Gallipoli, the British aren't really interested in trying to take this critical port city by like a sea, a naval invasion,

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  because that just doesn't tend to work out very well for them in this period.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And so they have to call upon the writers of Rohan.

• 4:20Robert Evans?

  They do have to call upon the riders of Rohan. And the reason why this has a chance of working is that Lawrence is going to kind of, Lawrence's idea that he, and there's some debate here as to like who specifically decided to attack Akaba, but Lawrence seems to be the one who was like, I can take, instead of like marching in from either of the sides they expect, the kind of back of this city is to this vast desert that is considered impassable because like, how would you get a bunch of guys on foot across this, right? Like, it's just absolutely some of the deadliest terrain on planet Earth. And Lawrence is like, if we get a small force, you know, we can take this tiny guerrilla, and it's literally just a few dozen guys, across this vast desert, and then cross into

• 5:05Robert Evans?

  the portion of Syria where the Hawatot keep their spring pastures, and we can find all of the people who live in this area, rally them to our banner, and attack Akaba. According to Lawrence, when he broached this plan to Aoda, Aoda's response was, "All things are possible." Where was Gondor? Yeah, yeah, where was Gondor when the Westfold fell? No, although he does give, like, I would say, an equally cool response to anything in The Lord of the Rings. He says, "All things are possible with dynamite and English gold."

• 5:40Robert Evans?

  There's a, that's an eternal truth.

• 5:45Robert Evans?

  Enough dynamite and English gold, I feel like I could do anything too. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this is, you know, there's a bit of debate here as to like, the extent to which Lawrence was kind of central to all the planning here. In 2014, Iraqi historian Ali Alawi published a biography of Faisal, who after the Great Arab Revolt went on to be the first king of Iraq. His reappraisal of Faisal suggests that Lawrence was not the one to suggest Akaba as a location to attack, and that Faisal made that call on his own. Now, I kind of feel like the, the fact that Lawrence gets a lot, gets credit for coming up with the idea of going after Akaba in the first place, is less Lawrence's fault, and more sort of the fault of that

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  Peter O'Toole movie because I went through seven pillars of wisdom and I read the portions of the book which discuss Akaba and there aren't a whole lot. There's not a whole lot of Akaba talk in the book, not a whole lot of Akaba talk about. And it does not seem like what's in there from what's in there. I know I had to do it. I had to do it.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  It's sufferable.

• 6:50Robert Evans?

  It doesn't seem like to me like Lawrence was taking credit for the idea itself just to attack the city. In fact, he notes that Faisal was unable to participate in the attack, which quote, "through the ungrateful load of this northern expedition upon myself," which sounds like he's saying, "it was not my idea, but Faisal was, you know, had to stay at his base for this. So I had to like handle the implementation." Right?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:14Robert Evans?

  And he describes the fact that like he had to be the one on the ground doing it as leading to a dishonest implication, which I interpret as him being kind of uncomfortable with being given credit for dreaming up and executing the whole campaign.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Which is like kind of one of the biggest problems with him in general, right? Is how people like view him as like the one white guy who saved everyone or whatever.

• 7:33Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Which is, I mean, and I hope it's hard in a podcast episode focused on Lawrence because there's so many people involved on every side of this to not have it seem like you are, I mean, and he does play a central role, but he's also not the only shot guy. He's not the only shot. He's certainly not the major shot caller on the British side either, right? Like General Allenby up in Palestine is making a lot of calls and making a lot of direction. Faisal is a major player here. And I, I think actually Seven Pillars gives a pretty fair accounting of how that all actually worked out. And despite how central Akaba is to the movie, the actual battle, the capture of the city only merits a couple of sentences in, but really

• 8:15Robert Evans?

  just a sentence because all he writes about it in the book is, "we tricked the Turks and entered Akaba with good fortune," right? Which is not like to be blown up into the absolute like center of this like four hour epic movie. Very funny.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Is this, no, they didn't do this with 36 guys. They did this, but the 36 guys went and got allies.

• 8:35Robert Evans?

  And got other guys, right? Yeah, it was, it was the 36 or so, I think it was like 45 or whatever, that, that crossed the desert. And this is, this is an amazing feat. It's like one of the most impressive feats of insurgent warfare. Cause they, they crossed this massive, absolutely merciless desert with just literally nothing but what they are able to carry on them with their camels. Lawrence and 45 men. And each of his fighters, all they have on them is a 45 pound sack of, of flour and all of the water they can carry. That's all they have with them to keep them alive.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Proper heroes.

• 9:11Robert Evans?

  Just a huge sack of flour. Well, it won't go bad, you know, not in the time that you're out there. And I guess like, yeah, that's, that's all you got. Flour and water to keep you moving.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  I mean, sometimes raw calories will do. She said high on sugar.

• 9:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, that's, it's completely changed my prepping loadout. My, all I keep in my truck is 90 pounds of flour and a bunch of water.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the camel trailer was a good touch.

• 9:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. I do have a camel.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:37Robert Evans?

  It's miserable here. A horrible place to have a camel. They do not do well in the Pacific Northwest.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It's like Huskies in New Orleans.

• 9:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, I think a big part of like, why Akaba gets so, so much focus is that it is kind of the first time Lawrence becomes a celebrity. Because at the time at which they, they successfully take Akaba, the Brits are kinda hungry for a win. The Western Front is mostly bad. Like even the good news is really bad news. Gallipoli was this catastrophe. And so the fact that like, this is, they're going to take this strategically important city from the Turks quite easily is a big deal. So after two hideous months, it takes them two months to cross the desert. Like that's how long they're living off of this sack of flour.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It's a big desert. Okay. Uh huh.

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  It's a, it's a huge desert. Yeah. Like this is an incredible feat.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:26Robert Evans?

  Um, Lawrence and his guys reach the outskirts of Akaba. And by the time they get to the city itself, they, their numbers have grown to about a thousand. They recruit all these guys from the local tribes in the area. Uh, and the Turks who were slightly more competent.

• 10:39Robert Evans?

  in real life than in the movies. The movie just shows Lawrence and his guys riding in this glorious Rohirrim cavalry charge and they just smash the Turks. That's not at all what happens. They don't even actually fight in Akaba. What happens is the Turks send a 550 man relief force to bolster Akaba's defense. And before they can get to the city, Lawrence and his, his cavalry fall upon them and ambush 45 or 40 or so miles north of the city. Uh, in a place named, uh, Wadi Aba Alisan. And this battle, there's like a kind of funny, like clown shit moment and like, it starts with this, again, very Lord of the Rings shit. There's this argument between Lawrence and I think it's Auda

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  about like, who's going to attack where first? And finally, Auda and his guys charge in on one side. And so Lawrence is like, fuck, we have to charge it on the other. Like, just go, just go, just go. You know, we can't let them like beat us to there. And then as they're running, Lawrence is just like, like emptying his pistol, like while charging on camelback and he shoots his camel in the head.

• 11:42Robert Evans?

  Auda loses his camel too. Auda has like 14 bullet holes in his gear when this battle ends. And I don't think any of them actually hit his body. Like, like this guy is just a, like a fucking Tolkien character.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got plot armor.

• 11:56Robert Evans?

  He's got plot armor. Yes, he's got him. He's the main character.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 12:02Robert Evans?

  So as much of a shit show as that kind of sounds, like the battle goes incredibly well. They kill like 300 something Turkish soldiers, absolutely destroy this entire force. And Lawrence lose, Lawrence and, and Auda lose two men.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Which is like, that's a, that's a big dub. That's about as well as a battle could go.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:26Robert Evans?

  So that's part of why this becomes so like famous, you know, overseas is like, wow, what a fucking, what a fucking coup.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Now, I hope it was a different camel than the one that took him all the way across the desert. I hope he like switched to a battle camel.

• 12:38Robert Evans?

  In there. Yeah. Yeah. Aragorn like charging at the fucking Battle of Pelennor fields and accidentally cuts fucking horse's head off.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:47Robert Evans?

  Gandalf blasts a lightning bolt into shadowfax.

• 12:52Robert Evans?

  The king of horses just tumbling as they hit the orc lines.

• 12:59Robert Evans?

  I do also like to imagine that in like Aragorn's version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, like the whole Battle of Helm's Deep is just the orcs attacked us at Helm's Deep and we won.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  We figured it out.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  We figured it out. It was fine.

• 13:15Robert Evans?

  Our friends came.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, that is kind of like, because Gandalf goes off to get help, right? And so he's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the equivalent of him going through the desert. Anyway.

• 13:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:26Robert Evans?

  Now, a big part of why Lawrence had been so motivated to take Akaba, because like there was debate, you know, should we, should the French help us out with this? Are the British going to like, you know, attempt some sort of like landing? Lawrence doesn't want any Europeans in the city because at this point, there's a lot of debate. We don't really know when he became aware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which we're going to talk about and explain here, but that's basically the British-French Agreement that like split up the Middle East under their spheres of influence, right? We don't know when Lawrence knew about it, but the actual answer is probably, that doesn't really matter because he was aware of the debate around what became Sykes-Picot, right? From pretty much the beginning. So maybe he didn't know until late November, you know, 1917,

• 14:11Robert Evans?

  when it got leaked out that like this specific agreement had been signed, but he knew that his leaders and the French were talking about carving up the Arab world and he didn't want that to happen, right? He was okay with the idea of the British having a sphere of influence in the Arab world. He didn't want the French, because again, the French, the genocide and stuff. He was not happy with them. And he's, in general, like, he feels like there's this guilt that he's got kind of this whole time with the idea that like, I am fighting for Arab independence and I'm pretty sure my side is going to betray these people, right?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  That we're not going to live up to our promises. So a big part of why he wants to take Akaba and he wants the Arabs to take Akaba is the more cities that they are in military control of when this thing ends, the better their odds of keeping those cities under their control, right? Like if the British or the French occupy Akaba, there's no getting them out. You know, like, they're not gonna leave, right? They're gonna set up shop.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 15:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  To do some terrorism in order to get the British or the French to leave.

• 15:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Whereas, you know, if, if the Arabs are running Akaba, like, they're running Mecca, and then the French are like, okay, well, we're gonna come in there. It's a lot easier to be like, well, no. Like, we already, we already have this set up. We're good. Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  What a mindfuck for Lawrence, because, yeah, it's, I mean, like, at least this version of him that's being presented, which makes sense to me.

• 15:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wants what's best, but he's, like, working within a flawed system, and he knows that, not just a flawed system, but an evil system.

• 15:40Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And he's like, oh, this is gonna go badly.

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  But still being like, well, that's better than letting the Turks.

• 15:48Robert Evans?

  What else am I gonna do?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  It's complicated, yeah.

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  It's, he's, he is, he is in a very complicated situation, and there's a lot to say about, he is kind of lying to all of these Arab guys that he, he claims to love and consider brothers, right? He's, he is not telling them the full truth, but he is also lying and actively kind of betraying England, like, in a way? Because he's actively trying to, like, I, he's not telling his superior officers, he doesn't tell them that he's planning to even attack Akaba this way, right? Like, they don't find out until the city gets taken, because he, he doesn't want them to make a move that would put them in the city, right?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:23Robert Evans?

  So he is kind of, he's kind of, I mean, he's, he's, the situation he's in, he's kind of fucking over everyone to some extent.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:31Robert Evans?

  But I think he is, overall, trying to, trying to secure what he sees as a good outcome for the Arabs, right?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:40Robert Evans?

  Again, doing the paternalistic thing, if he's not gonna tell them necessarily, he does, there's some, there's some evidence that he eventually does, kind of, that he does talk, like, come out about some of this to, like, Faisal, but it's all very murky, right? Like, again, this is skullduggery and spycraft.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I want the 16-year-old to have been secretly planning the whole thing.

• 17:00Robert Evans?

  Right, right, yeah. Unfortunately, we don't get a happy story ending for Dome.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:06Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, it's a bummer. So, the, the British government spins the Battle of Akaba into this, like, massive thing for them, because they really needed the good propaganda. And when they start doing this, Lawrence, he's got this keen, instinctive understanding of the moment that he inhabited. One of the things that makes him, like, such a, such a, uh... An incredible figure here is that he has an understanding, not just of all these dynamics of insurgent warfare, but of how propaganda plays into insurgent warfare and plays into actually securing victory here. And he knows that now that the British are invested in his success, because they need these wins, this is my best chance to get them, to force them to deliver guns and support from my Arab allies, which will allow them

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  to take and hold more cities, which is going to give them the best odds of winning a state of their own and not just being cut apart by the great powers. So again, Lawrence is kind of aware of the broad strokes of Sykes-Picot. And to be clear, Sykes-Picot never actually gets instituted. When we talk about the significance, it's not because they actually do Sykes-Picot, it's because Sykes-Picot is an evidence of the ways in which the British and French are talking about carving up the Middle East. And what finally gets done looks a lot like what Sykes-Picot was planned to be, right? But it's not exactly the same thing. Just to be clear here, because like actual scholars would be like, well, they never really did Sykes-Picot. It's just what happened was very similar, and it's evidence that this is how they'd been talking, right?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:33Robert Evans?

  For a long time. So at this point, the Brits are still reeling from several failed assaults on Jerusalem, where the Turks had beaten them back and established a dusty desert version of the trench stalemate on the Western Front. A general named George Allenby was brought in to clean up the mess. And Allenby is more competent than most British generals, we'll say that, right? Like, not that he's got a spotless record here, but he's definitely like, better than the guys who had been doing this before. And Lawrence knew that, you know, once Allenby comes in as the only British officer with a major victory behind him, he was in a position to get a lot out of his new boss. So he travels to where Allenby is, and I think Allenby's in Palestine at this point, and he sits down with his boss

• 19:18Robert Evans?

  to get Allenby to send guns to his men. Lawrence's motivation here, according to Scott Anderson, was to sell Allenby the World War I general equivalent of heroin, which is a promise that he can break a stalemate in front, right? Lawrence is like, I can stop the Turks from getting relief forces from Medina up to, I think, Jerusalem, and I can also, like, basically ensure that you have as good a chance to break this stalemate as possible by carrying out my own offensive that pulls Turkish strength away, right?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Just give me the guns.

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  Just give me the guns. And here's how Anderson describes it. Lawrence vastly exaggerated both the strength and capability of those rebels already under arms to paint an enticing picture of a military juggernaut, the British advancing up the Palestine coast as the Arabs took the fight to the Syrian interior. Now, that's succinct and overall accurate, but Lawrence's own account of his meeting with Allenby and Seven Pillars is much more colorful. So I'm going to read that here because I just really like the guy's writing. "It was a comic interview. For Allenby was physically large and confident and morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness came slow to him. He sat in his chair, looking at me, not straight as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He was newly from France,

• 20:32Robert Evans?

  where for years he had been a tooth of the great machine grinding the enemy. He was full of Western ideas of gunpowder and weight, the worst training for our war. But as a cavalryman, was already half persuaded to throw up the new school in this different world of Asia and accompany Donnie and Chetwode along the worn road of maneuver and movement. Yet he was hardly prepared for anything so odd as myself, a little barefooted, silk-skirted man, offering to hobble the enemy by his preaching if given stores and arms and a fund of 200,000 sovereigns to convince and control his converts. Allenby could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it."

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Wow. I left him unhelped to solve it.

• 21:17Robert Evans?

  I fucking love the way he writes.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  He's like, "Yeah, I was lying some, and it's up to him to figure it out, but I'm not telling."

• 21:23Robert Evans?

  He knew I was, but he didn't know how much. Not my job to figure that out for him.

• 21:31Robert Evans?

  All right. Anyway, you know what I'm not gonna leave you unhelped to do, listener, is purchase the products and services that support this podcast.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  I'm gonna spend my money on gambling.

• 21:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's where Lawrence would spend all of those sovereigns, you know?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Smart money is always on gambling.

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Gamble out with your hamble out. I don't know. Whatever. Fuck it.

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• 23:06Robert Evans?

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• 24:06Robert Evans?

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• 24:42Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. And we're talking T.E. Lawrence. So Lawrence is, you know, too canny to believe everything.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  More like Tee Hee Lawrence.

• 24:52Robert Evans?

  Tee Hee Lawrence, that's right. Tee Hee, because he's sneaky.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:56Robert Evans?

  So his own ambitions are a lot more modest than what he's trying to sell Allenby on, right? He doesn't, he doesn't really believe, you know, he knows the reality of the strength of his forces. And he wants all these guns to build a more disciplined insurgent movement that will be kind of the core of this Arab state, right? And part of what he, he, like, he's, he's kind of less focused on these big offensives that Allenby wants because he, he understands that the tactics, these Western Front tactics, had led his, you know, were not the way to win in the desert. So after Akaba, he takes, he embarks on yet another, like, historically significant recon campaign. He takes two men with him and alone against a vast desert. They travel like 1,000 miles or something, like this massive journey,

• 25:41Robert Evans?

  scouting out all of these Turkish positions. The whole operation was inspired by a recognition on Lawrence's part that thus far, the war had involved haphazard playing with men in movements. And he saw that this had worked for them, but largely out of luck, and quote, "vowed to know henceforth before I moved where I was going and by what roads."

• 26:00Speaker 01

  He's not much of a delegator, this guy.

• 26:02Robert Evans?

  He is not. He does a lot on his own. Like, he, I think part of it is that he can't really make these plans unless he feels the ground beneath him, right? Like, that's just the kind of thinker he is. Um, I think he just also likes it too.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 26:18Robert Evans?

  The purpose of this recon campaign was to help Lawrence figure out how to build what he called a ladder of tribes across Syria, eventually leading from Akaba to Damascus. Describing this plan, James Schneider writes, "The nature of the operations would be like naval war in mobility, ubiquity, independence of bases and communications, ignoring of ground features, of strategic areas, of fixed locations, of fixed points." Lawrence would command the desert, camel raiding parties, self-contained like ships, might cruise confidently along the enemy's cultivation frontier, sheer of an unhindered retreat into their desert element, which the Turks could not explore." That's so interesting to me that he's thinking about this like a naval war. Each of these small insurgent squads is like a ship, right?

• 27:01Robert Evans?

  Independent, alone on the sea, you know? Yeah, it's so fluid and you have to think the mind it takes to keep track of this as well as he does.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:13Robert Evans?

  Not that he doesn't fuck up. He's got after Akaba, there's a major defeat that like he has kind of when he overst stretches his, his forces, but like, you know, for, for the most part, this is an extremely successful campaign. So during the ride into Akaba, he had worked out exactly how far a unit of camel riders could operate with a 45 pound bag of flour and a pint of water. They could operate alone for like six weeks, right? That's his assuming that like-

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I guess they're good at getting water somehow.

• 27:41Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, they know where there are like places to get water. And so this, these forces-

• 27:46Speaker 01

  They use a life straw.

• 27:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a life straw. These tiny units of camel riders, just, just powered by flour and water, have an operational range of 2,000 miles without resupply, right? That's how far they can go.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Rules.

• 28:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's fucking cool. And when you look at that range and you compare it to like an Ottoman company of infantry on foot can handle, which is like a couple of miles past the railway. You see what a nightmare he's created for the Ottomans with these little raiding parties.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  They can be anywhere in this vast ocean.

• 28:15Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you are trying to fight a naval war with infantry treading in the water, right? That's what the Turks are trying to do.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna quote from Schneider again. Because of longstanding feuds and jealousies, it became virtually impossible to integrate or amalgamate the various tribes. Nor could one antithetic tribe operate in the territory of another. To overcome this organizational constraint, Lawrence operated in the greatest dispersion possible, which contributed greatly to his agility, fluidity, and mobility. Maximum disorganization created maximum articulation. As with a box of Legos, Lawrence could create any organization and function as unique as the new task at hand. For each mission was unlike any other and had to be considered afresh. The Lego-like articulation meant that the enemy response could never develop a classic order of battle. For there was no order, only disorder. His system was unsystematic.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  That's cool. One of the things that I'm really obsessed with strategically is how chaotic forces can integrate into traditional war. And like,

• 29:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  And how, yeah, like, I think we see this in activism all the time as people try to get all of these groups to be like, oh, if only they were all under one command. And you're like, you're not playing to your strengths at that point.

• 29:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Like, having diverse movements is stronger if you do it right.

• 29:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cuz, I mean, cuz kind of the difficulty and the trouble with, you know, the kind of activists we know is you need both, you need this maximum articulation, right? As Schneider describes it. But you also do need a vision, a central vision.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 29:53Robert Evans?

  Because you have, you have this ultimate disorganization, this incredibly flat hierarchy compared to the other militaries of the day. But you also have Lawrence at the center of this spider web, pulling, pulling in each direction, right? Like, making the actual, like, pulls.

• 30:10Robert Evans?

  Which is, is very tough. There's not a lot of Lawrence's out there.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:14Robert Evans?

  I do love that line, "Maximum disorganization created maximum articulation." I think there's, there's a lot of wisdom in that.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  So a big part of why these forces work is that unlike the vast conscript armies of the Western Front, Lawrence's soldiers are all either believers or at least, at least they're willingly for the money, right? Cuz like, Some of these, Lawrence kind of, Lawrence talks them up, you know, he has a line, "Their only contract was honor," which is debatably true. Like, Auda, who we've been talking about, is going to make an approach to the Turks and like, be like, "Hey, if you bribe me, I'll switch sides." And he may have been considering switching sides, but he also just robs the Turkish guy with the money. But it's unclear, because of when everyone else finds out what he's done, it's unclear, was his plan from the beginning just to rob Turk, just to rob

• 31:03Robert Evans?

  the Ottomans? Or did he move, did he decide, "Well, I guess I'll just rob this guy," once he got caught? Because he didn't want to, he didn't want to get like, you know, murdered or whatever, right? Like, was he actually trying to be, turn traitor? Or did he just, was his plan from the beginning, "Hey, I bet these guys are dumb enough to send a bunch of money my way, and then I just have to kill the guy bringing it. I don't give a fuck, I am a sand pirate," you know?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, totally. The honor among thieves question is always a fun one.

• 31:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and Auda is not the kind of guy who gives a shit about your conceptions of honor. He has, he has his own code, for sure. But I don't, I don't think anyone else really fully understands it. Lawrence wrote, quote, "Irregular war was far more intellectual than a bayonet charge, far more exhausting than service and the comfortable imitative obedience of an ordered army. Guerrillas must be a loud liberal workroom. In a regular war of two men together, one was being wasted. Our ideals should be to make our battle a series of single combats, our ranks a happy alliance of agile commanders in chief."

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I like it.

• 32:10Robert Evans?

  I like that, too. So what are the key points here is that unlike most European officers in similar situations, Lawrence had not taken, well, I said he's taken nothing of Western military doctrine. That's not really true. He's just taken, he's taken some Western doctrine that is not popular with other people. Because that Austrian Dassaks is kind of someone who had been writing a lot of the same things, and Lawrence is very influenced by Dassaks. But Dassaks is certainly not influencing, like, British strategies at the Somme, you know?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:40Robert Evans?

  Nothing but machine guns are really influencing that, right? It's all these guys who want to be Hannibal but can't think of anything more creative than throwing their men into the teeth of a bunch of German guns. So what's interesting about Lawrence is that, you know, for all that he is an imperialist, he does not fall to the temptation of imposing British standards on these Bedouin fighters. His, his only thought is to give them modern English guns so that they can fight their way. And he's writing the whole time he's got to try to, he's trying to argue to his superiors as to why this is how they should handle the whole Arab revolt. He writes a series of 27 articles meant for publication among British officers stationed in Arabia. Now, these are part propaganda.

• 33:23Robert Evans?

  Some of what's in these is Lawrence lying about the strength of the Bedouins to make a case, you know, as to why they should be supported. But he also includes a lot of very good advice on how European officers should change their thinking to avoid bringing Western Front problems to this new war zone. Like, he is trying to explain, like, why they ought to respect the Bedouin and how to respect the Bedouin, how to kind of let these people do what works. The next phase of the war sees Faisal's raiders launch this blizzard of attacks against Ottoman positions around the Hizaz railway, destroying sections of track and bridges, but also things like watering holes that train operators relied upon for coolant. Lawrence, again, leads many of these raids from the front.

• 34:04Robert Evans?

  He counted that during this period, he personally destroyed 79 bridges, which is, that's like, that's like hurricane level of bridge destruction Lawrence has done.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Hurricane Lawrence.

• 34:18Robert Evans?

  Hurricane Lawrence, yeah. Lawrence often would set the charge himself, and he became something of an innovator in the field of explosives by, by helping to, like, develop this technique that he called "scientific shattering." Now, the point of this, this is very interesting, was to ruin the bridge, making it unfit for transit, but to leave it standing, right? And the, the logic here is that a standing bridge that's ruined can't just be repaired. First, you have to destroy it before you can rebuild it. Whereas if you just blow it up, then that, all they have to do is, like, clear wrecked your way, right?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've done half the work for them.

• 34:53Robert Evans?

  Right. This extends the time, if you fuck the bridge up scientifically, they have to spend even more time destroying it the rest of the way before they can- Rebuild it. Now, I know all of you listeners at home are taking notes. How do I scientifically shatter a bridge? I've never blown up a bridge yet, but I can read a quote from Lawrence's book to describe how he did it.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yet. What do you mean yet?

• 35:14Robert Evans?

  Yet. I haven't yet, Sophie. That's just a factual statement. I haven't destroyed any bridges yet.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Consol me before we do this.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  I once was hitchhiking into Louisville, Kentucky.

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  The trucker who picked me up was this older, I think Vietnam vet. He's pretty quiet the whole drive and he's like dropping us off in the middle of the night and he like does the trucker thing where he just like stops the entire, like when he wants to do something, he just stops the truck and all traffic just has to deal with it, you know?

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  And before we get out, he turns to us and goes, "You kids ever blown up a bridge?"

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  Amazing stuff.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  No. No, we're children.

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  So here's how Lawrence describes to blow up a bridge. "Hastily, we set about the bridge, a pleasant little work, eighty feet long and fifteen feet high, honored with a shining slab of white marble, bearing the name and titles of Sultan Abd al-Hamid. In the drainage holes of the spandrels, six small charges were inserted zigzag, and with their explosion, all the arches were scientifically shattered." So there you go, guys. Put some dynamite in the drainage holes and let her rip, you know?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  Now you can go take out bridges, which you shouldn't do.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Especially not with someone that you meet at Food Not Bombs or some activist circle.

• 36:33Robert Evans?

  That's, that's, that's gonna go badly for everyone.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:37Robert Evans?

  Don't destroy any bridges unless you find yourself taking part in an Arab revolt against Ottoman power. If that's the case, you know, if you get transported back in time to 1916 and you have to help the Bedouins fight for their independence from the Ottomans, then it's probably okay to blow up some bridges.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Or if it's your bridge, you know?

• 36:55Robert Evans?

  Or if it's your bridge. If you make a bridge, who's to stop you, right?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:58Robert Evans?

  Maybe someone owns a demolition company out there. There's lots of legal reasons to destroy a bridge, right?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:04Robert Evans?

  Now, the bulk of the insurgent work that Lawrence does in this period is done by Camelback, but for his own team of raiders, Lawrence is going to eventually settle on a different mode of transportation, which is these armored Rolls Royce cars. They do, they do get, they do, they are by the end of this like cruising around in Rolls Royces, blowing up bridges, which is pretty gangster, right?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Is it the same level of like luxury car that it's seen as now?

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  No. I mean, I don't think so at this point. These are armored cars, so.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:34Robert Evans?

  Um, these sturdy vehicles allowed the nine man team that he preferred for commando work to carry hundreds of pounds of gun cock and explosives and move rapidly from target to target. While Lawrence was helping to execute a successful insurgency in the heart of Ottoman territory, the powers that be in the British Empire had started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The Americans were almost to the Western Front, and with the possibility of victory came the sweet prospect of carving up the Ottoman world for European consumption. If you spend literally any length of time talking to people in the Arab world today and asking them in brief, why is everything so fucked up? Every conversation will at some point circle back to Sykes Biko. During the fighting against ISIS, I talked about Sykes Biko with like 12 year old boys, right?

• 38:17Robert Evans?

  Like, like people know it over there, and it's the thing I think a lot of Americans don't really know much about. It is, as one New Yorker article aptly described it, "The curse that still haunts the Middle East." Now, the first of the men that Sykes Biko was named after was essentially a dark mirror of Lawrence. Sir Mark Sykes was the son of Sir Taton Sykes, who married an 18 year old girl at age 48 and then disowned her publicly in the newspaper when she spent too much of his money. That's, that's Mark's dad, yeah?

• 38:49Robert Evans?

  A lot of pieces of shit in the British nobility. Mark was their only child, and he spent his childhood moving between his father's 34,000 acre estate and his mother's London home. He traveled the Ottoman Empire regularly as a tourist with his dad. And then when he became a young man, he joined the military and participated in the Boer War. He became a conservative member of Parliament, and he writes books about like the, the Ottoman Empire and the, you know, and the kind of the Islamic world, right? And he is, during the First World War, kind of one of the first major, he's a major advocate within the British, you know, government for the independence of Arabs, Armenians, Jews, and Turks, right? So long as that independence existed under European control and profit, and his thinking

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  here is less, these people deserve their independence, and more, if we cut them up into individual little, like quasi-states under our control, it's going to be a lot easier to keep everyone dominated, right?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Oh shit, uh huh.

• 39:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, over the last four few pre-war years, Sykes had become the Empire's resident expert on the Arab world, based on the strength of him like vacationing there a bunch, right? Uh, and the fact that he was a baronet. He was referred to-

• 39:59Speaker 01

  I can just picture this character so easily, they're like, daddy.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  Daddy, daddy. He was referred to as the mad mullah as he watched or rushed around London building support for this Arab revolt against the Ottomans, who he hated for the squalor and poverty that he saw in cities like Damascus. Now, he's not entirely misguided here because the Ottomans are not good rulers, uh, but his feeling that the way to improve things was to set Europeans up over the poor, bumbling Mohammedans. Sykes was paired with François Georges Pico, a French diplomat, to portion out the Ottoman Empire into little bits to various powers. As the war worked towards a close, there were a lot of hopeful claims. Italy wanted the Aegean Islands. Greece wanted traditional Byzantine territory in modern Turkey. Russia wanted that some good, some of that good Asia Minor shit as well, although they're

• 40:47Robert Evans?

  not going to be, you know, at the table for very long here because of that whole Bolshevik revolution.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Robert Evans?

  And of course, the Zionists wanted a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And it's interesting, one of the big, I, I was actually kind of unaware of this, one of the big, like, one of the reasons why there's a support for the Zionists is people who are, is like, people in the, be, the British government who are scared that Russia is going to collapse under a socialist revolution and are like, well, if we give the Jews a homeland, obviously all socialists are Jews, right? So if we give them a homeland, you know, in Palestine, then maybe they'll leave Russia and they won't destroy Russia, right? Like, that, that's literally why a lot, there's a lot of early support for Zionism among the British government. It's like, this, this, this super concentrated racism.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  God, I love how Schrodinger's Jew, where you're either a capitalist or a communist or somehow both at once, you know?

• 41:41Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, you control all the money and are a left-wing radical, yes.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:47Robert Evans?

  So this was, to put mildly, if you are people like Sykes and Pico, any of the people, you know, in the British government above Lawrence's level, who are trying to figure out what the post-war is going to look like for this region, there's a lot to keep in mind, right? There's a lot of competing claims. There's a lot of different, you know, national groups that are kind of agitating for independence too.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Are they just gonna ignore it all and just carve it up willy-nilly?

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's more or less what Sykes is gonna do because he's British, right? So he's only focused on-

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I've read about Korea.

• 42:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. He's mostly focused on his country's closest ally, France, right? And France wants something they called Greater Syria, right? They think, obviously, this is natural French territory!

• 42:31Robert Evans?

  In deference to the large number of young men that France had thrown into the wooden shippers on the Western Front, they got most of what they wanted. The fact that they were doing a 50-50 genocide ratio in the Muslim majority areas that they had governed in the past should have been a warning that like, this is not going to go well. But no one anywhere has ever learned a lesson, ever. You know, that's the primary lesson of history is that no one learns lessons. And no one, no one has learned any lessons from France fucking around in Algeria, certainly.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I haven't even learned this lesson.

• 43:01Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Now, it would have been obvious at the time that what, you know, the planning going into Sykes-Picot was, would lead to catastrophe. The Ottoman Empire had been collapsing for some time. In 1830, France had taken Algeria and immediately done a genocide to put down the rebels there. They had gained control of Tunisia in 1881, and they actually waited until 1958 before they did a genocide in Tunisia. So really, I mean, like, it's kind of impressive. They've got, you know, they got more, uh, responsible. That's nice.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  The French have patience, you know?

• 43:33Robert Evans?

  The French, yeah, they have patience. They waited almost a whole century before they did a genocide in Tunisia.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  Now, under the final agreement between France and England, a large region of the Ottoman heartland directly above Syria would be under direct French control, while a triangle that included Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul would be like, kind of independent, but under heavy French influence. Whereas the British would have an area of influence that was like this large chunk of the desert on the peninsula south of the French mandate, and they would hold direct control over much of modern Iraq, stretching to the Arabian Gulf. Sykes would go on to solidify his role as one of the most harmful dudes to ever cause harm by also pushing the Balfour Declaration to the British Cabinet in November of 1917. He's like one of the forces behind the Balfour Declaration.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  And this is the like, the early Zionists.

• 44:24Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Although, the actual Declaration itself spends more time talking about like Jewish populations in European countries, right? Because a lot of, in the chaos in Russia, a lot of like Jewish people had fled Russia and like wound up in England, wound up in other European, like that is actually more of what the Declaration is, but kind of the the outcome of the Declaration is this is the first time that there's official British government support behind the Zionist desire for a homeland in Palestine. Now, the actual text of the Declaration, like of the agreement being made is like, of course, no one will be displaced. None of the, none of the current like inhabitants of Palestine will be displaced as a result of this.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:04Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, yeah, through magic. In true imperial fashion, Sykes's primary justification for, for supporting the Balfour Declaration was his own rampant antisemitism. He believed that if great Jewry was against us, the Allies had no hope for final victory, right? Because again, these guys are both communists and they control all the money, right?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're also both incredibly strong and, or they're, they're weak, sniveling, effeminate people who will absolutely destroy us if they get the chance.

• 45:33Robert Evans?

  Right, right. It's, it's the common like proto fascist bullshit.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, which we're dealing with right now in America about the left.

• 45:39Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Antifa and stuff.

• 45:41Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. It's, it's, it's, I mean, it's just kind of these people, right? Sykes is, Sykes is the kind of guy you see all throughout history. And in this case, he's antisemitically talking himself into Zionism, which is a fascinating part of the history of this whole, of this whole moment.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, very common method of encouraging Zionism at this time.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, after setting up like a third of the 20th and 21st century's worst dominoes, Sykes lives happily until, in a rare win for humanity, he dies of flu in 1919. So. Again, I have to keep going back to like, is influenza so bad? You know?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, Spanish flu got somebody.

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  It took out Sykes. That's not the worst, you know?

• 46:24Robert Evans?

  So back to our boy T E Lawrence. We don't know precisely when he found out that Sykes Picco was a thing. The agreement first entered public awareness in late 1917 after the October Revolution led to the overthrow of the Tsar. The Bolsheviks get a hold of a bunch of different like paperwork, right? That, you know, had been in the hands of the Tsar's government. And some of that is the Sykes Picco Agreement. And, uh, yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  If you overthrow your government, you get the notes.

• 46:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Trotsky actually leaks a copy of Sykes Picco to a newspaper, right? And then The Guardian publishes the details in English media for the first time after this. In early reporting on the matter, Lenin called Sykes Picco, quote, "the agreement of colonial thieves." And there's really no fact-based argument against that, you know? That's that. He was just right. He was just correct on that.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Well, didn't they, uh, weren't these the like, I think they were called protectorates or something? There was like a different word. They were like, oh, we don't, we don't own this. We're just gonna help you.

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  A lot of these are spheres of influence, right? Yeah. Yeah. So when, and again, this is not, Sykes Picco is not what actually happened specifically. Cause like they get carved up, you get like Iraq, you get Jordan and right, that, none of that's in Sykes Picco. That all comes later. But Sykes Picco is kind of evidence of, of what they've agreed to basically, right? It's the broad strokes of what's going to happen. So when Lawrence had left Cairo, this had not all been as settled as it was by November. The British government's official line still was that it was inciting an Arab revolt to, to secure their total independence. Lawrence clearly knew that there was some extent to which this was bogus from the beginning, which is why he wrote in Seven Pillars, "Hardly one day in Arabia passed without a physical ache

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  to increase the corroding sense of my accessory deceitfulness towards the Arabs and the legitimate fatigue of responsible command." Right? So the fact that this is all a lie is wearing on Lawrence, especially since the greater part of his job was to personally negotiate deals with various Arab tribes to fight the Ottomans with the promise of independence after the war. In letters back to his superiors, Lawrence protested what became Sykes Picco. Anthony Satin describes this for an article in Al Jazeera. He objected loudly to the agreement for several reasons. He thought that the French should be allowed nothing, having behaved so badly in Algeria and elsewhere in northwest Africa. He thought a post-war Commonwealth of Arab states under British tutelage might

• 48:47Robert Evans?

  work, and he protested at having to ask Arab forces to fight on what he called a lie. "I can't stand it," he insisted, and yet he continued.

• 48:57Robert Evans?

  And if we're looking for like, Lawrence is a bastard, this is, this is getting into some of the better cases for it, right? Because like, he talks about how much he hates this, he is trying to, but like, trying to work against Sykes Biko on the ground, but he also knows what his government is planning, and he's, he's kind of being a Pied Piper to these guys, that he cares about as it goes on.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Oh, that's wild, because he's also, overall, he's someone who's trying to act based on morality rather than like, cold strategy. He's obviously a strategic thinker, right? But he's like, he's thinking, you know, because geopolitically, you have to give the French something, and he's like, no, they don't deserve anything because they're terrible.

• 49:39Robert Evans?

  But they're dicks, fuck 'em.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, whereas he's able to sell himself on the idea that a British protectorate or sphere of influence won't be as bad.

• 49:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  And, and some of that might be even some of his own like, chauvinism from being from that culture, but also, it might have been a honest appraisal of the situation. But then, yeah, like, he's like, trying to act more from a moral position, but he knows he can't. Oh, that's so, I mean, yeah, he could have, he could have just been like, "I have entirely abandoned England," and, you know.

• 50:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he doesn't.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:15Robert Evans?

  So.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  So he's canceled.

• 50:18Robert Evans?

  So he's canceled. Yes, we're canceling T E Lawrence, we've decided. The fight against Sykes Biko was to dominate the next years of Lawrence's life, but he would have missed the public reveal of Sykes Biko in November for a very unfortunate reason, which is that that month, he was captured by the Ottomans.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 50:35Robert Evans?

  Now, this is actually one of those ifs, because we, this may be something he lied about, but if it happened, this happened while he was conducting one of his many recon missions. He describes in Seven Pillars Islam that he was hiding himself as a circassian in the city of Dura when he was drafted. Basically, like they see a young man walking around and they're like, you're in the army now, buddy. Right? Because he's, he's good, he's good enough at hiding that he's like a circassian, right? That they think, okay, well, we got a time for you to be a member of the army that you're fighting. Now, Lawrence says basically like the draft was just kind of an excuse to take me into custody. What happened really is the governor wanted to fuck me, right?

• 51:14Robert Evans?

  And he describes lengthily how he was beaten and tortured and then gang raped by the governor and his guards in Seven Pillars. This is like, and it's interesting because like, this is a pages long description of like torture and rape. He doesn't quite describe openly sexual penetration, but basically everything else, right? And it is ultimately published in 1922. I, I don't know if Lawrence was the first famous man of the 20th century to write publicly about being raped, but the list ahead of him can't have been long, right? Like, there can't be a lot of competition for that, that role.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  People were really, really into like, and then the curtains are drawn.

• 51:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Historically with their writing.

• 51:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And he does that a bit, right? Like, he's not as open about, like, he doesn't describe it in, in, but he's like, this is like, it's a very detailed description of like the torture and stuff to the point that the people who think this is fake is kind of like, Lawrence is sort of like writing his own sexy fanfiction here.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Oh, because he's a masochist.

• 52:18Robert Evans?

  Maybe, right? You know, maybe.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Or this is why he's a masochist, is to try and recreate this.

• 52:23Robert Evans?

  He's a masochist because he's raped and tortured. Yes.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a way to, you know, experience the same thing, but under his own control.

• 52:30Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And, you know, I'm going to tell you right now, what actually happened here is unknowable to us, right? Now, there, I am going to give the best arguments as to like, why this is fake, because I think that's responsible. I tend to think it was probably real, but I'm not a historian.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:47Robert Evans?

  So I debated whether or not to read some quotes from this portion of Seven Pillars. I opted not to because like, it's really upsetting stuff. Like, this is a legit. ...upsetting description of torture and sexual assault. In recent years, some Lawrence biographers, namely James Barr, who authored Desert on Fire, have argued that Lawrence could not have been in Darah when he claimed this happened, and have even found evidence that he doctored his notes to further this lie. Barr's argument is that Lawrence came up with this story later, after the war, to, quote, "discredit Arab militants in the precarious post-war climate." I find this an odd argument, which is not really in line with Lawrence's other post-war behavior, but in my research for this, I did run across a couple of pieces of evidence

• 53:32Robert Evans?

  that might be seen as evidence that Lawrence's lie continues to work in the present day, like discrediting, not Arabs, but like these kind of like, uh, some of these local fighters. Here's a segment I found on the website, firstworldwar.com, and this is talking about like the Ottoman use of rape as a weapon. This indignity was more often inflicted on members of the officer class and the belief that it robbed them of their authority as a leader of men, sometimes resulting in the victim's suicide. The Ottoman Turks were infamous for inflicting it throughout the Great War on captured Indian troops, beating and gang raping enemy officers often as a matter of due course. Prisoners and garrisons often had personnel who specialized in this abuse, although there was nothing homosexual about it.

• 54:15Robert Evans?

  And this is kind of contra to Lawrence's description, because he does describe this as being a very like, the governor and his men are homosexual, right? Like, they want to fuck Lawrence, and that's kind of the result of all this.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Well, you just get into ideas of like what counts as homosexual being like,

• 54:33Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  in a lot of different places, the active person is not the gay person, you know?

• 54:38Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah. And there's a, yeah, we'll talk more about this, but first, wait, have we done our second ad break?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  No. We have not.

• 54:45Robert Evans?

  Okay, here's some ads, motherfucker.

• 54:48Speaker 04

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• 55:19Robert Evans?

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• 56:18Robert Evans?

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• 56:58Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. So, you know, we're talking about was Lawrence of Arabia gang raped? Uh.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Light dinner topic.

• 57:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, light, light dinner topic. Now, when it comes to like the anti side of this, Barr is joined in doubt by academics like Adrian Greaves. Greaves makes some points that I find compelling, particularly that the Turks were unlikely to have believed for days that Lawrence was really an Arab captive. Um, or Sir Cassian captive, but he also takes issue with the fact that Lawrence didn't bring this up until 1919. Right? That's one of Barr's pieces of evidence that like this is probably fake is that Lawrence doesn't talk about it. And I'm like, no, it's not really weird that you'd wait like a couple of years to talk about your gang rape.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, most people take that to their grave. Yeah.

• 57:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's not, I don't really think that counts the way that you seem to think it does. Yeah. And there's also some gay panic adjacent stuff in some of these arguments. Historian David Fromkin has suggested Lawrence made up the rape to explain whip marks from his alleged sadomasochistic kink. I don't know who is right here, but I do want to read this line from an article on Cleo's visualizing history website. Biographer John E. Mack, however, accepts the story and Lawrence's later assertion at that, that what happened to him at Dara apparently did permanent damage to his psyche. And there is compelling evidence for this damage, although separating what might have been caused from the rape, what, what was PTSD, right?

• 58:26Robert Evans?

  Um, because of the war is be and all of the illness, right? Like you get PTSD from nearly dying repeatedly of various like shit yourself to death illnesses. It, there's no way to separate this, right? Like Lawrence is after about a year or so, because he's really not there all that long. He's there like a, like two, two years and all. He is just a pile of PTSD stitched together, together into the crude image of a man.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  On one of his best days, he shot his own camel in the head by accident. That was one of the best days he had there.

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  That was one of his wins. Yeah. Like he is just destroyed as a person and

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  It, it is, I think, very consistent. Now, Barr has a really good point when he kind of pieces out, it can't have happened exactly the way Lawrence describes it in the book, right? Because we know there's some, just some things about the timing of where he was when that don't work out. And that doesn't mean he didn't, it didn't happen in another city and he lied and said it was Dura for some reason. There's, they're also just like, people fuck up, right? Like Lawrence is going to-

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Classic thing to remember really well.

• 59:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We'll talk about this in the next episode. Lawrence is going to like destroy his notes several times and just, and lose drafts of this book and have to rewrite it. So like, some errors probably got introduced, but it is now agreed and even, and Barr even writes that like broadly speaking, Seven Pillars is quite accurate as in its descriptions of what happened in the, the Arab revolt, right? And I tend to think this probably happened to Lawrence. And, and part of why is because he has a, a personality shift after this point. And it kind of loses his mind in a way that seems very much like, oh yeah, I bet if you were gang raped and then suddenly had an army

• 1:00:14Robert Evans?

  and a bunch of Turkish soldiers surrendering to you, this might be how you'd act, right?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Oh, is this where he's gonna go bastard?

• 1:00:22Robert Evans?

  He is, he is going, he is going to kill a lot of people in part four, Margaret.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 1:00:28Robert Evans?

  He is going to kill a ton of dudes.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Okay, cause like, the bastards formula is to get you to become sympathetic with a terrible person and then like, but halfway through. But you, you had me for the first three acts, you know?

• 1:00:41Robert Evans?

  I don't know, I still, he's going to commit war crimes.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Everyone in war does.

• 1:00:45Robert Evans?

  I still don't know that this makes him a terrible person. Like it's a bad thing to have done.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Robert Evans?

  Right? But, I don't know that anyone who is capable of doing the things that he's done up to this point in, in, in, in a war, who is capable of the competences that he showed, would by this point be able to have better judgment in this way, right? Which isn't to say like, it's fine that he did this, it's just that like, well, anyone in this position would have, would be out of their minds.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Robert Evans?

  By a certain point, because that's just what- Like personally, like orchestrating an insurgent campaign in the desert while shitting yourself to death and nearly dying every single day in gunfights, like it just ruins you, you know, like he is just shattered as a man. And there's a very good chance part of that is that he's tortured and gang raped. Yeah, like, who, who would be doing well after this?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. They didn't blow up the bridge, they just dismantled it.

• 1:01:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they dismantled it, but they left, yeah, they left the shape intact, right? Again, he's just like a bunch of trauma piled into a bag shaped like T E Lawrence at this point.

• 1:01:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this man is so fucked up.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  Speaking of fucked up, Margaret, let's go get fucked up and then come back to record part four. And by fucked up, I mean,

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  I'm as fucked up as I get, because the only drug I do is sugar, but I've had a lot of it.

• 1:02:13Robert Evans?

  I'm high on life, Margaret, which is a powerful mix of heroin and,

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, that's all life?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a new gas station drug.

• 1:02:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a new gas station drug. I, that's what I call it when I mix kratom and those yellow jacket pills, and then just a bunch of five hour energy and grind that up into a shake with a little bit of milk, little bit of oat milk, you know, just for flavor.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  I guess, don't do that, friends.

• 1:02:40Robert Evans?

  Do that, friends.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Instead, you should purchase Margaret Kiltra's new book.

• 1:02:43Robert Evans?

  If they sell it in the, yeah, purchase Margaret's new book, you know, The Sapping Cage, it's excellent.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  And if you're listening to this several weeks ago, you can go see Robert and I talk in Portland.

• 1:02:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yeah, this will have happened long before by the time this airs, possibly in a world where we're all preparing for fascist takeover of the government.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Sounds great.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  And everyone's like, going to the bridge.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  I'll be there, guys. This'll be great. This'll be great.

• 1:03:10Robert Evans?

  This'll be great, yeah.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Sounds amazing. Also, I really want to plug something we just did on It Could Happen Here. James Stout, who is a phenomenal journalist that works on the It Could Happen Here show, just did a week long series about the dairy and grap and land migration. So check that out.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I haven't listened to it yet. I've talked to James about it the whole time.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  It's amazing. So please, please check that out.

• 1:03:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

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• 1:04:31Speaker 07

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• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Welcome everyone to Fanta in 60, a brand new show with me, John Fanta, and my co-host, Jay Croucher. Join us as we bring the fan-first energy to NBC Sports Now. My new show is the place for understanding the week in sports. We'll talk big storylines, viral moments, and most importantly, we'll hear directly from you, the fans. It's going to be a great hit. I can't wait for you all to see it. Fan 10 60 airs Mondays at 6 PM Eastern on NBC Sports Now and NBC Sports Radio. See you there.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.