Lawrence Of Arabia

INTRODUCTION - In a letter which I received from Lawrence on the day of his fatal accident, he wrote, Most children are fed up with the war and the inclination among its survivors to treat it as a matter of significance. I sympathize with them the last war is always a bore for the next generation. There is, of course, such a thing as hearing too much about those days in the conversation of ones elders, but it would be difficult to find anyone, young or old, who is not interested in the striking figure of Lawrence and in what he did in the Revolt of the Arabs. It is a tale of desert rides and raids, with battle, murder, and massacre, under molten skies or in bitter, driving gales and snow. Here I have indicated those scenes and also tried to show the man himself, his pair for tactics in the field, his more unusual gift of understanding the strategical results of his successes, the magnetism which drew the Bedouin to him, and the high soul and genius which transcended all these things But the story does not consist merely of thrills. In the maps, only the necessary places are marked which appear in the text, but the reader must study them, note the relation between places-particularly along the Pilgrims Railway from Damascus to Medina-and remember the scale, so that he will be able to estimate the distances between them. Without this the meaning of his marches, feints, and destructive raids cannot be realized. The better the map is known, the more the deadly game played by one of the most magnificent guerilla- leaders in the worlds history will be understood and appreciated. R. H. K.