Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine - The World War I ...

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA 31
moral as well as intellectual inferiors, who had occupied
higher offices than his but had perhaps distinguished
themselves less therein. And it was from such that he
knew the bitterness, the contemptuous bitterness of
irrefutable calumny. We are told that his military operations
were on a small scale. So were those of Thermopylae
and of Agincourt. We are told that anybody
could have done what he did, with Allenby behind
him, backed by the golden sovereigns of the British
Treasury. But Paladins of the stamp and stature of an
Allenby do not accord themselves, nor the resources
of the British Treasury to an "anybody". He was
actually accused of a publicity engineered by intentional
mystification; and indeed it must have irritated some
other public servants to find a man without a handle
before his name or letters after it, without a dress suit
and with an income of under a hundred a year, nevertheless
pursued and chronicled by an eager limelight
which seemed in comparison to black out their particular
merits. I have even heard his strong columns of English
belittled as having been built, as he said himself, upon
the foundation of Doughty ; and true it is, that Doughty
was no less his literary ancestor, than Gibbon
Macaulay's. Dante gloried in "taking his fine style
from his master", Virgil. If Lawrence lit his candle
from Doughty's flame, was the candle any less his own?
There are two classes of public servant. Of one it is
said: "What is he doing now?" Of the other: "Who is
Minister of this or Governor of that." The first category
will interest and arrest and fascinate the world. Lawrence
was one of those first. Mr. Winston Churchill is one of
them, and so is Mr. Lloyd George. The second, a far
more numerous category—will be identified as occupying
most of the best places.
Lawrence was throughout the last months of his
life oppressed by gloomy forebodings. In one of his
later letters he spoke of "an utterly blank wall" after