Part One: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Oh, what's the Dodgers won the World Series?
The Daughters won the World Series?

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Won the World Series? Not that's not the open is
dressed up as a Dodger.

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I was dressed up as Kendle Roy.

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This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert is
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This is a four part or do it next time?

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Margaret? Have you have you? How do you feel about
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But this company says they've got it figured out, they're
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You know, land on that kind of stuff that I am,
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Ca Yep, that's I've got.

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I've got a plan for how we can how we
can make this work for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Well, Trump probably wants to bring back back the ore ox.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, I mean, I honestly, I don't mind bringing back
the ROX, but I would focus on the dinosaurs, and
I think what we do here. You know, obviously America
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particularly has come down against any kind of like functional

(01:21):
laws on that regard. So let's work around the problem. Right,
people can't die of gun violence if every American is
dying early in a dinosaur park accident. And I honestly
think if we rejigger our entire economy around cloning dinosaurs,
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(01:44):
our current domestic issues. Right, you know, nobody's going to
be you know, all of this shit the GOP is
going on about migrants, you know about trans people. If
everyone's just dying to dinosaurs, right, you know, there's no
more problems we do think every issue in American society.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I think it would be good for humanity to not
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that if as you were getting ready to go to work,
you opened the door, and like a rabbit exiting her burrow,
you had to look both ways for predators.

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Because the Veloci raptors escaped from Disney World again, like
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Speaker 1 (02:23):
Anderson's dressed is Kendall Roy from Succession, and I'm very
proud of this costume.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, who is a baseball? If you're watching this and
you don't know what that is, h kender Roy is
a baseball with the Dodger and l to the old
He's the best.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
He's the best linebacker in the New York Yankees the.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
New York Lakers. Yeah, oh my god, I've got to
sit the New York Yankees. But yes, that that's even
better killing me, Margaret.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Speaking of the Yanks, you know, that's a team for
all of the rich assholes in America. But before we
had the New York Yankees, we had their political equivalent,
the British Empire. How do you feel about the British Empire, Magpie?

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Primarily negative?

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Primarily negative. Well, I guess that's pretty obvious because they're terrible. Yeah,
what do you know about probably like the most famous
hero of the British Empire of the twentieth century, Lawrence
of Arabia.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
I know almost nothing about Lawrence of Arabia, but I'm
very excited about excellent. I've been recently really interested in
learning more about the Ottoman Empire. We'll be talking Ottomans.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, cool.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
A lot of Ottoman shit is going to be going
down in this story. So this is, you know, maybe
a slightly different kind of behind the Bastards episode because
I think, like the title of this could be, was
Lawrence of Arabia a bastard? And that's a complicated question.
He is a guy who the appraisals of him have

(04:01):
gone kind of back and forth since his death in
nineteen thirty five, from like, oh, you know, he was
this hero of the empire and a hero of the
Arab people who like backed their liberation from ottom and tyranny,
to he was an agent of imperialism who like betrayed
and you know, manipulated these Arabs that he claimed to

(04:25):
care about, and has a lot to do with the
modern fucked up state of much of the Middle East
and the Muslim world, Like a lot of our current
lot of like what's going on in Gaza right now,
in fact, does have a lot of direct ties to
Lawrence of Arabia. And then you know to today where
I think there's another reappraisal going on, and you've even

(04:46):
got some like left wing scholars. You were saying, well, actually,
like the really critical views of this guy are not
entirely fair. So it's one of those things what kind
of will repeatedly revisit, Like where do we think this
guy's landing? Is this guy a bastard? Is he maybe
a cool person? Or is he kind of somewhere in
the middle.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Are you saying that historical people can be morally complex
and so yes, yeh wow, absolutely, that would destroy both
of our show's concepts if that were true.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
And it's also he is particularly hard to judge because
he was a spook, right, he's a spy, you know,
he is an intelligence, and so he lies to everyone
constantly the entire life.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Often for good reasons.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
A lot of his lies are like, well, I would
have tried to do the same thing in his situation, right,
And then a lot of his lies are like, oh,
well I can see why that, Like, the guilt from
doing this destroyed your entire life, Lawrence.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
That was pretty fucked up.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
So he's a guy I have always been interested in
him because it was my dad's favorite movie. And I'll
tell you right now. The I rewatched late last year
the Lawrence of Arabia movie from the sixties whenever it.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Was holds up.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
If you haven't seen it, I really do recommend watching
it because it's fucking gorgeous. You know, it was made
in an era when if you were going to make
a movie about T. E. Lawrence, you sent a bunch
of dudes out to the desert and you blew up
trains with dynamite. There was no other way to get
those shots. And that's pretty cool. I think he's also

(06:15):
really relevant because one thing we all share as Americans,
you know, whether you're left or right or centrist, is
this very strange and somewhat incoherent love for insurgents, even
though we also find ourselves constantly fighting and losing wars
two insurgents and this all. You know, it has its
roots in the kind of mythic origin of our nation,

(06:38):
the Revolutionary War, but it also has its roots in
you know, I think at this stage we have to
acknowledge that George Lucas is as much a founding father
of this nation as George Washington, right, and so like,
you know, it's kind of impossible to separate the our
love of the you know, the the Founding fathers and
their insurgents struggle from like fucking rebel alliance, which we
all learned about at age like four.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
You know.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, So we're going to talk about te Lawrence this week.
And when I brought Lawrence up in conversations, particularly with
friends who are on the left, I noticed that I
think the general, the general trend is for people to
write him off as like an orientalist and imperialist and
you know, the British Empire's equivalent of the CIA agents
who spent most of the twentieth century overthrowing democratically elected

(07:23):
governments around the world. And it's fair to view him
as all of those things. There's an extent to which
all of those are accurate descriptions of the man. But
he's also not someone you can ignore if you are
on the left, especially if you're if you're one of
these people who has ever sat around talking about like,
you know, revolution and like, could you know some sort
of like insurgent left wing movement, you know, take power,

(07:47):
you know, defeat the United if any of that is
shit that you care about, if you just care about
you know, what's happening over in Gaza. If you're interested
at all in how asymmetric warfare can topple powerful states, right,
you have to study Lawrence of Arabia, because in some
very important ways he invented like how warfare works in

(08:10):
the twenty first century. Like he is the guy who
created and codified our modern concept of how an insurgent
struggle works, right, you know, and that's people are going
to be like, well, that's ridiculous if you think of
an insurgent struggle as just like some dudes who aren't
regular soldiers, like ambushing imperial troops in the desert or whatever. Right,

(08:32):
Like that's been going on for for fucking ever. Right,
you know, that shit was happening when the Romans were around.
It happened to the Greeks, happened to a fucking Alexander
the Great Troops when they marched through Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Right.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
But that's not what an act. That's not what modern
insurgent warfare means. Modern insurgent warfare is a much more
complicated thing that involves the use of insurgent troops alongside
regular national troops and a struggle between empire that takes
place over a wide geographical area, right, Like, you know,

(09:05):
when you look at how Vietnam won their war, it
wasn't that the viet Cong just outfought the Americans and
the Jungles. It was that the viet Cong participated in
a very complex struggle that also involved regular state forces
that had the backing of other empires. And you know,
that conflict took place not just as a conflict in Vietnam,

(09:26):
but as part of a broader conflict between the Soviet
Union and the United States. And the way that worked was,
you know, heavily informed by a lot of the theories
that Te Lawrence wrote out as a result of what
he's doing in the Arab Peninsula during World War One.
And to make that case, because I'm sure there's some

(09:46):
people being like, what the fuck are you talking about, Robert,
That's nonsense. I want to talk go a little bit
ahead of the story right before we actually talk about
Lawrence's life to something that happened about a decade after
he died in nineteen four. Now, this is a story
that relates to what would become the Vietnam War. But
in nineteen forty six, you know that the Vietnam War,

(10:09):
the Indo China conflict. It's not really an armed struggle
quite yet. It's still at this point a disagreement over
the region of Asia than known as French Indo China.
During the rule of Napoleon the Third, powerful interests in
the French Navy had succeeded in pushing from military control
in the region that had expanded across much of modern
Vietnam until their control. France's control was interrupted by Japan

(10:31):
during World War Two. Now, if you know anything about
Vietnamese history, the Vietnamese people had a long history of
identifying as like, we are Vietnamese and we are not
the people who are in charge of our land right now.
Right Vietnam's history has a lot of occupation by foreign powers,
and the end result of that is that when Japanese

(10:51):
occupiers took over, they met with spirited resistance. Now, one
of the leaders of that resistance was a man named
vo When Japp, who, by any stretch of the imagination,
deserves to go down as one of the great military
leaders of all time, and you could argue is probably
the greatest war leader of the twentieth century. During his
long and storied life which ended in twenty thirteen, I

(11:14):
had realized he made it so long. Japp led Vietnamese
forces to victories against the Empire of Japan, France, the
United States, and what you could either call a victory
or at least a solid draw against China, and like,
who else has that record? Who else could claim that shit?
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
From nineteen forty one to nineteen seventy two, he was
the military commander of the Vietmen, and he orchestrated the
Battle of Dian Benfu, which forced an end to French
occupation of his land. Now, before Dan Binfu in nineteen
forty six, it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that
Japan and France were going to fight, right, the Vietnamese

(11:55):
had helped to oust the Japanese occupier, and they were
kind of there were negotiations taking place between Vaux and
the Vietman and you know, the French political and military establishment,
and there was at least some hope that maybe a
conflict could be avoided. So Vo sits down in Hanoi
in nineteen forty six for a meeting with General Raoul

(12:17):
Salon to see if there was a way to work
things out peacefully in a manner, you know, Salon at
least is like in a manner that still leaves France
basically in charge, right, And obviously this was a doomed measure,
but they don't necessarily know that at the time. One
of my sources for these episodes is the excellent book
Guerrilla Leader by James Schneider, a professor of military theory
at the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth.

(12:40):
Schneider opens his book with the story of Jopp and
Salon's meeting and describes it this way. Toward the end
of the meeting, discussion turned towards Jop's success in resisting
the Japanese occupation of Indochina since nineteen forty. Salon wanted
to know the source and inspiration of Jiop's success. Without hesitation,
Jiop reached behind his seat and withdrew from a shelf

(13:01):
a heavy book and laid it before Salon, who recognized
the author immediately. Jap gestured towards the book, saying, my
fighting gospel is T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
I am never without it.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's cool.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is. I mean, that's that's high
praise for your book. Yeah. I hope that one day
My book A Brief History of Vice is the is
the bible of an insurgent leader destroying French tyranny over
their land, maybe.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
In France, be destroying something.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
This has taught me to tell all, have all of
my troops mixed tobacco and their own urine together and
then make themselves vomit. I think the key part of
modern insurgent struggle.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
One of the things that I kind of can when
you were saying earlier about how you know you think
of gorilla warfare as like, oh no, you just like
jump some people in the wood, just beat them up
in the in the forest. Yeah, yeah, and like because
that's the way that most movies are sort of representing
guerilla warfare, because you know, that's the sexy part of
a gorilla struggle over yeah right, yeah, And realizing that

(14:02):
there's this like lineage of development of how like, just
like how technology develops, so do tactics and organizational strategies.
Oh yeah, and yeah, So realizing that, like because you'll
read about the social democrat nihilist from Russia. Stepniak wrote
a book on guerrilla warfare from his time fighting I

(14:25):
actually think fighting the Ottoman Empire, but I can't remember,
you know, but.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
That was they helped a lot of people figure that
one out.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah yeah, and uh, you know, but it's like, but
then that's that's not the one that people are using.
And then you you know, you fast forward to after
World War Two. I know, a lot of people were
writing like, gee, how do partisans work? You know, and
so it just it really interests me that there's development
also of just like literally how do you organize this stuff?

Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I mean and because there had to be, right,
especially because the conflicts of the twentieth century are so
much much wider in scope and more complex and able
to be because of the level of development that exists. Right,
so you need new theories of how to actually wield
a modern the story of modern insurgent struggle and the

(15:13):
kind of stuff Japp was doing, because Jiapp is not
just a line level guy, right, he is thinking about
grander strategy is how do you wield insurgents as a
weapon in concert with the other weapons of a modern state? Right,
That's the question, and that's what Lawrence is kind of
a formative scholar on now at the point in nineteen

(15:37):
forty six, that Jiapp is showing off his copy of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom in this meeting. T E. Lawrence
is still very famous, right. He becomes a celebrity as
a result of what he does in the Middle least.
That's why there's a fucking movie about him, right, And
he was famous primarily as this guy who wo had
helped the Allies win crucial victories over the Ottomans by
welding these Arab bandits into an effective force. This is

(16:00):
as well, like partially an accurate description of his accomplishments.
But Jiapp understood better than Salon what Lawrence had really done,
and as a result, Lawrence is kind of puzzled when
he hears that Jiop has this copy of Lawrence's book,
because Celon is like, well, this is just a guy
who like taught some desert Arabs how to ambush trains. Right,
that has nothing to do with fighting the Japanese in Vietnam.

(16:23):
Why would you consider this relevant? And I'm going to
continue with another passage from Schneider's book, ah Giop replied,
is that your assessment of Lawrence Selon nodded a casual
affirmation of course, then you have missed the whole point
of Lawrence, said Jiap. He is less about fighting a
guerrilla war than leading one, and leadership, Giop emphasized, is

(16:44):
applicable in any context, desert or jungle, military or civil.
And so if you're someone who might be inclined to
ignore or dismiss Lawrence as just another like imperialist proto
cia guy appropriating a local culture, I would encourage you
to consider there's something worth finding in what Giops saw

(17:06):
in the man, right, Yeah, And it's worth studying anyone
whose work was a critical part of the strategy that
led Vietnam to victory over the United States because in
a lot of ways, that gave us the twenty first century. Right,
you kind of have to study a guy who can
do that. And I will say one of the through
lines of the story, we'll be reading some quotes from
separate pillars of wisdom. One of the things that makes

(17:29):
Lawrence a powerful insurgent leader, which is part of why
I like the story, is that he's an excellent writer.
He's just an actually incredibly talented, beautiful prose and that's
a big part of why he is an influential military theorist,
and I kind of like that.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
That's cool. I'm want to read Seven Pillars now.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
It's great, Yeah it is. It's actually very very good
and is now historians have gone back and forth on this,
but like modern historiography will agree, gen't really accurate. As
we'll talk about, there's a couple of areas where Lawrence
probably lied or at least may have lied, but generally
accurate to what happened. So Schneider's book makes a pretty

(18:11):
good case for Lawrence as like the father of modern
insurgent warfare. My main issue with his book is that
he focuses on like the how and a lot of
just kind of the military nuts and bolts, and as
a result, his story leaves out something that the nineteen
sixty two movie leaves out, which is, why would a
guy born into like the comfortable upper middle class of

(18:32):
life in the British Empire choose to become, you know,
a leader, not the leader of an Arab revolt against
Ottoman power?

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Right?

Speaker 3 (18:41):
How do we get there? And that's the story we're
going to tell today. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on
August sixteenth.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Eighteen eighty eight.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
Before this section, sure you know who else was born
on August sixteenth, eighteen eighty eight in the United Kingdom.
Probably not our sponsors. They're probably Donald Trump again. Oh god,
there's a good chance.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
I missed the gambling ads. I miss them too, No Chumba,
Maybe not by the time this comes out. Yeah, we'll see,
no said, will be an ad for gorilla warfare. Yea
gerrilla warfare.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Disappointed about the election results, you know, one way or
the other, A lot of people are going to be
thinking about guerrilla warfare in the wake of this election
coming up in a couple of days. So that's part
of why I wrote these episodes. Uh, and we're back.
So Lawrence was born in maybe the most ridiculously named

(19:43):
region of Great Britain Trinidog trimid Dog, Carnovanshire, Wales, which
I know I've pronounced wrong. I don't like, fuck you people,
look at that trimid dog. What does that even mean?
That sounds like that sounds like medicine for fleas or
like if your dog's too fat, you give it trima dog. Right,
It's just like, excuse.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Me, I'm sure you're not body shamed dogs.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
Excuse me, I'm.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
Not I'm just saying, if you were selling that medicine,
like if you're selling dog o zimbic, you call it
trima dog dog o zimbi has to be a thing, right,
there's no way that's not coming.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
I really hope not. But you're probably Oh no, there's
no way.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
There's no way that's not gonna There's no way that
there's no way there aren't people who are already shooting
ozimbic into their cloned dogs. I love, that's definitely happening.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Drugs just go both directions real quick now, like horse
drugs for humans.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Yeah. Me, you came over the other day and we're
talking about how like rintros on trasa doone and hey,
so am iras a buddies.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
No, it made it great when I was I was
in a place that was never mind, I want to
I don't want to tell you anything about how I
acquired some I've always gone through the problem channels to get.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
I love the proper channels, Margaret, speaking of the proper channels.
Lawrence comes from a line of people who did things
through the proper channels. His father was not born a Lawrence.
He was instead born a member of the Landed nobility,
Sir Thomas Chapman. Now Lawrence's his family, like Lawrence's ancestors,

(21:23):
are the literal Irish landlords responsible for like so much
of that island's misery, Like when you read about like
those like absentee, Like, that's Lawrence's people, right, that's the
line he comes from. So Lawrence's dad's family, the Chapman's,
they send Sir Thomas Lawrence to Eton, where he is
abused and molested into being a proper young inheritor of

(21:45):
the empire. And he was, by all accounts a normal
boy of the landed nobility until he marries someone who
is like a bad match for him, which is not
unusual in his social class. But he is not capable
of being happy and like a loveless marriage. And also
you know, he's a romantic. He's a romantic, and his

(22:06):
bride only gives him daughters, right, so he's like also
not thrilled about that. So, like many men of his
social standing, he picks up a mistress and he brings
her to Dublin, where she gets pregnant with his child.
This child comes out of boy, which is what he
had wanted, and he makes the incredibly questionable decision to
give his bastard child his name. Right, Hell yeah, now

(22:30):
it's herd. That's not if you're trying to keep this
on the down low, which you're supposed to do, that's
a bad way to do it. This does not lead
to a sustainable situation with his other legal family, and
everything falls apart for Sir Thomas, and one of the
things like there's there's this fucked up old timey stuff.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
This is dad.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Sir Thomas is Lawrence of Arabia's dad. Last Lawrence is
a bastard, right, So Sir Thomas, what's interesting about him
to me because up until this, like, oh, he's not
happy that his Mary, his legal wife, only gave him daughters.
So he has a mistress and a secret family. That's
not weird. What's weird is that when this gets exposed

(23:12):
and his life falls apart, he's just like, fuck it.
I don't want to be a nobleman anymore. I have
no attraction to this social circle. So he makes a
deal with his wife. You get all the land, you
get nearly all of the income. I'm going to keep
a small portion of the income so I don't have
to ever work a job. But you get like ninety
percent of everything right, and I'm just not going to

(23:33):
be a chapman anymore. I'm going to disappear and live
under a new name and raise my bastard son and
live with my mistress who I actually love. Is that
cool with you? And his wife is like sure, that's
a good deal.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah, Now you don't have to have a husband.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
It seems like a pretty good deal given that this
is the eighteen eighties. Yeah, so yeah, they do this,
and Sir John moves out of Ireland to Wales and
he takes up a new name with his still a mistress,
never legally a wife, and they become known as mister
and missus Thomas Lawrence, even though again they're never legally married.

(24:10):
So that's where Lawrence's name comes from. It's not his
real name, it's the name is Dad Picks after abandoning
his life as a member of the landed nobility to
go live with his mistress in Wales, as we all
hope to do one day. So t E Lawrence was
their second son. He was born in Trimidoc, not long
after Thomas's old life fell apart. Now his dad is

(24:34):
racked with guilt over what happened, right, he does seem
to feel bad about a lot of aspects of this.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah, but their daughters aren't super excited about I.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Bet his daughters aren't thrilled. But Yeah. Lawrence's mother, Sarah Lawrence,
which is very funny that that's her name, was the
self herself the child of an unwed, illegitimate union. So
she actually doesn't feel bad about this at all, and
she is by far the domineering force in the relationship.

(25:04):
Like you get the feeling Lawrence's dad is kind of
a sad sack and his mom is like, shut the
fuck up, like you don't have to work, like good,
Like chill the fuck out. There's nothing wrong with the
fact that we were not married and having kids. Like
she's Irish or English. I think she's English. Her name
is Sarah Lawrence, which does sound like an English name.

(25:26):
Lawrence would later write that his mom saw their father
as quote her trophy of power. Lawrence has some mom issues,
but also I don't see any reason why this is
necessarily wrong. He describes her as a very controlling woman
and his father as like kind of a mild person. Now,
one of the things that's really unique about Lawrence's dad.

(25:48):
He is in a very i mean not just a
rarity for the age, but he's almost a singular figure
in that he is an attentive, full time father. Right.
He never has to work and he has no social
obligations to keep up, so he pours all of his
interest into being there all of the time to raise
his kids, which.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Like doesn't happen, no, but it's like certain people's dream yeah,
like stay at home dad. Like yeah, money's taken care
of by inheritance or whatever.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he is living a lot of
people's dreams. And it's just so interesting to me that,
like Lawrence is like the one guy in nineteen in
Victorian England who's raised by like a responsible dad, at
least responsible to his sons. In the wonderful book The
Young te Lawrence biographer Anthony Satin writes that Lawrence and

(26:41):
his four brothers never quote had an unhappy or even
an unsettled life. They moved more often in their first
few years than most families moved in a lifetime, but
they were close knit and well loved. Now from an
early age, their parents don't inform them of their actual
lineage of like all everything that went down with dad
before they became Lawrence's But from an early age, te

(27:05):
and his brother ned they're very smart kids, and they
have inklings that they might be bastards, although they think
for a very different reason. Right, they think that like
basically there was cheating going on within between their parents
as opposed to the real story.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
Right, they think their dad isn't their dad.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Yeah, I think their dad isn't their dad. Now, this
is this is something that is a trauma to a
degree for young Thomas because he and his family they're
very religious. They're raised incredibly strictly in the church, and
sex out of wedlock is a big deal. The guilt
his father felt, which eventually compelled him to reveal the
truth to his sons in a deathbed letter, may have

(27:46):
bled over to them in some way. Whatever the truth,
Lawrence wrote himself about being dogged by a peculiar sense
of worthlessness his whole life. Right, this is the way
this manifest is he always kinds of things. I'm just
a piece of shit, Like I don't believe anywhere. I'm
a bad person. I come from nothing, you know, I
don't deserve anything. This is like he's he's got imposter

(28:08):
syndrome his whole life, despite the fact that he is
he is not just a smart kid. He is clearly
a genius. And when I say a genius, I mean
that as a small boy, he develops a scholarly fascination
and like a professional scholarly level of knowledge of medieval
art history. In order to indulge this knowledge, he would

(28:29):
travel around on foot and through bicycle to different historic sites,
either on his own or with a small group of
friends to His hobby is to make rubbings of brass
reliefs of crusaders and kings from various tombs and churches.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Right, a normal kid, like.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
A normal kid. Yeah, just a normal kid. Now, this
is even for the day, a nerdy hobby, right, kids,
are you know reading fucking at least kids of this
level of wealth or reading like fucking the Iliad in
grade school? But this is nerd for that day. Right.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
He started to do original research on the alien and
he's doing like original historiography, and Lawrence takes the nerdiness
up a notch by developing an obsession with fidelity and
completion that modern.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Day like nerd collectors will recognize, this is a kid
who in the modern era probably would have gotten way
too into like warhammer or something. Right, and I'm going
to put again from Anthony Sattin's biography, it was typical
of Lawrence that his interest should become obsessive. His principal collaborator,
his childhood friend, Cyril Beeson, known by his school nickname

(29:36):
of Scroggs, remembered that it was no collector's hobby. There
were experiments in the technique of rubbing with different grades
of heelball, a mix of lamp black and wax and paper,
assisted by friendly advice from shoemakers and paperhangers who shop
supplied our raw materials. Another school friend described the outings
as a ransacking. Nothing stood in Lawrence's way, So if

(29:57):
Brass's were hidden behind some pews, Lawrence, already ruthless, made
short work of the obstruction. And I still hear the
splintering woodwork, and his short laugh almost sinister to my
timorous ears. So he's he's both like he will destroy
any like you don't give a fuck about those pews.
He will break and damage church property to get to
these goddamn reliefs that he's going to do rubbing.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
Zod this is such a perfect British orientalist yes style
thing to get into, like, I'm gonna find the history
even if I have to destroy everything between me and it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
He is fucking child tomb raider. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
Now, Lawrence is despite his brilliance and uneven student when
he was interested in a type I think today there,
I don't know what kind of neurodivergent he would be
diagnosed as, but made probably all of them.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Right.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
One thing that is written about him is that if
he was interested in a topic, he would be he
would be so far beyond every other student in the
class in that topic, you'd be like at the teachers level.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Right.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
And if he wasn't interested in something, he couldn't do
the work at all. He was, he was completely non functional.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Right now, we can identify with this pretty hard.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
You're going to identify very hard with the next thing
we talk about here, because he is the way to
look at him. He is an early iconoclastic example of
a nerd. Right. He is a proto geek. Right, and
he is I even wrote this in the script not
dissimilar in some ways to our guest for these episodes,
Margaret Killjoy and let me make that case now. At

(31:31):
age fifteen, Lawrence leads his friends on raids through Oxford's
libraries to learn the secrets of how to make chainmail
and other medieval arms and armor for themselves.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
And he was doing when I was so our school
had to ban us for making chain mail.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah, this is what Lawrence is doing as a kid.
He's like the very first generation of Western kid doing this.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Right.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
They're making their own chain mail, their own weapon. They're
teaching themselves how to fight by reading medieval man manuals.
They learn how to speak appropriate old English and draw
heraldry from memory. Like this kid's soul is a wren
fair right, and Lawrence is one of those kids. His
interest in medieval history is always married with this deep

(32:19):
care for the fine details, for fidelity. One of his
hobbies he starts a hobby of like buying shards of
pottery from excavations in the city. Right, people will be
doing construction and they will they will turn up some
old pottery shards, and his hobby is like buy them
and meticulously glue them back together. And he is so
good at this as a teenage boy that local Oxford

(32:40):
museum still keep and display pieces that he rebuilt from
like the Roman era, Like he's that level of skill
that like even today his work as a child is
recognized as like pretty good.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
He was pretty good at that.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
So they made the case very bright kid, probably probably
fair to call a genius, the kind of.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Person who's going to do something really good or really terrible. Right,
as you've pointed out, somehow both.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Somehow, both certainly significant. Now for his own part, Lawrence
described his education at Oxford High School with the words
very little, very reluctantly, and very badly. Right. That's how
he talks about his like the end of his primary
school education. We can into it from some details that
we do have that he was the recipient of a

(33:27):
fair amount of bullying, as you would guess from a
child who is gluing together pottery sharks, like the.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Most infamous bully academy in history, the School for making psychopaths.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
Yes, he develops as a child a hatred for bullies
that is going to be with him his entire life,
and that, at age sixteen spurs him into some disastrous action.
In this particularly notable incident, one of his friends is
being picked on by an older kid, and Lawrence intervenes,
but he is not a large boy, right, This other

(34:02):
kid is much bigger. Lawrence intervenes because it's the right
thing to do, and the fight goes so badly that
his leg is broken enough that he misses a semester
in school. Right like he has rendered an invalid for
months because of how badly this kid beats the shit
out of him. His mother is convinced that the injury
stops him from growing into what should have been his
full height, although that's probably just not biologically true. Yeah,

(34:24):
I'm going to quote again from Satin's book here. The
injury exacerbated Lawrence's reluctance to join in. His eldest brother, Bob,
remembered that he was good at gymnastics and took part
in games in the playground, but Ned admitted that I've
never since I was able to think, played any game
through to the end. At school, they used to stick
me in football are cricket teams, and I would always

(34:45):
trickle away from the field before the match ended. The
obvience reason might have been physical, but Lawrence later thought
there were other more complex issues behind his avoidance of
team sports. Because they were organized, because they had rules,
because they had results. I find that so interesting.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
I identify with this.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
So if yeah, it's hard not to Yeah. Yeah. So.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Schneider, who's not as detailed as Satin when it comes
to dissecting Lawrence's personality in life, posits that Lawrence's ditaste
for organized sports has something to do with the fact
that he preferred to lead rather than follow. Now, I
think that's probably him working backwards and maybe an error.
The quote from Lawrence that Satin presents is a more
interesting explanation. They're organized, they have rules, and those rules

(35:33):
aren't my rules, right. I don't understand why things are
doing this this way, and I don't like just saying, well,
this is the way.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Things are done. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
In the summer of nineteen oh five, Lawrence cycled to
France with his father. This was not his first taste
of freedom again. He traveled extensively across the UK on
foot and by bike, motivated partly by a desire to
get away from his mom. But the trip to France
awakens something in him, and for the next several years
he feels this obsession with like I need to get
out there, I need to travel. But unfortunately he's got

(36:04):
to go to college. He attends Jesus College at Oxford.
Oxford is people talk about it as Oxford, but it's
actually like five colleges, and Jesus is one of them, right.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
And this is a college called Jesus. There's Jesus College.

Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, it just called Jesus. It just called Jesus. I
mean maybe they have a seminary degree, but that's not
what he's doing. He's getting an undergraduate degree. He's a
history dude, and he hates college. He hates it even
more than high school. He hates his undergraduate college. So
he has to find outside ways to stimulate himself. And
so in nineteen oh six, at age eighteen, he takes

(36:39):
himself alone on a twenty four hundred mile cycling trip
through France into the Greek coast. Now this is price
doesn't touch Greece. That's a long that's a.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
Long bicycle trip.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
And this is I think this is his equivalent of
if we're going back to the Margaret comparisons like being
a trained kid, right, because he takes this This is
not just about seeing, you know, France, It's not just
about cycling. It is an exercise in aestheticism. Lawrence wants
to see how tough he is. Part of the goal
is he eats as little as possible because he wants

(37:14):
to explore how little food can take me? Can I
live on while I going this distance? Right? And there's
also this intellectual dimension to it. He spends the entire visit,
he goes through every medieval church and castle on this
route through France to Greece, and he analyzes the architecture
in exhausting detail. And Schneider makes a supposition here that
I think is well founded, which is that he thinks

(37:36):
this journey is integral to Lawrence's growth into an insurgent
leader because it demanded and it cultured him in physical toughness.
And he's also pay it's training him how to pay
close surgical attention to his environment. And I have trouble
like arguing with that that contention here.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
I mean, it's like it's it's a little bit reading backwards,
but it's also right.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah, it's not necessarily wrong. Now, when you string too
many details together like that in a podcast, it can
make the man Lawrence seem kind of like an automaton
of history rather than a teenage boy. So one thing
I value Satin for is he includes details from this
trip like that, Lawrence, while he's you know, starving himself
and biking thousands of miles and taking meticulous historical notes

(38:20):
about all these castles and churches and stuff, he's writing
his mom letters constantly telling her that he's not going
to tell her any details about his journey. All I'm
going to tell you, mom, is descriptions of the buildings
that I've seen. And he does this so many times
that you have to conclude this is him kind of
sticking back at his mom because she's so controlling, Like,
fuck you, Mom.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
You don't know me.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
I'm not going to tell you anything about my trip.
I'm just going to describe these buildings to you, like
a little shit.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah. He also probably like fell in love like three
separate times on that trip. Yes, yes you have.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Well maybe not, Margaret. We're going to talk about that.
This Lawrence of Arabia may low key be our first
behind the Bastard's Ace icon. Oh okay, yeah, well but
we're building to that. Or he's a pedophile one of
the two. Mark I, let's hope for ace.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
So Lawrence's journey ends on the Greek coast with a
miserable case of malaria. He is also just sick constantly,
which I think is just unavoidable if you travel in
this period of time, Like if you are a world
traveler in the late Victorian era, you are dying of
fucking typhus or malaria or something eighty percent of your
waking hours. But while he's kind of trying to survive malaria,

(39:33):
he gets a view across the Aegean of distant Turkey
and this ignites something in him. Later he would write,
I felt that at last I had reached the way
to the South, and all the glorious East, Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tears, Syria, Italy, Spain,
Sicily Crete, they were all there and all within reach
of me. I fancy I now know better than Keats

(39:56):
what Cortes felt like, silent upon a peak, and Darian, Oh,
I must get down here farther out again. Really, this
getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance.
I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow. So he's
just the fact that he has to go back to school,
go back to England, so close to this this world

(40:16):
that he's just been reading about all of his classical
education and like the Crusades and whatnot. It's like a
wound in his soul that he can't just keep traveling.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
It's like I think for I think for a lot
of the Victorian, especially English, it's kind of like reaching
the world of fairy Like. Yeah, in the orientalist's mind,
you're like, oh, I have discovered the place where none
of the rules make sense, and I don't belong in
this world. So here's this other world, you know, like
Byron and all those people were like obsessed with the

(40:47):
Near East for that reason, you know.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
And if you were nerd in this period, there's not
Tolkien to fall into. They're certainly not like Star Wars,
but you have classic history and medieval history, right, And
so is for him like if someone today, if you
were to just stumble into Middle Earth, like right, like
that that's how he feels about it, and like that
is orientalism, right, Like that's a factor in orientalism. But

(41:12):
it's also when you think about it from the perspective
not of someone of power, but of this like boy
who's just been has this obsessive interest in the history
of this era area. There's a degree that you have
to be kind of sympathetic too at this stage where
it's like, well, yeah, of course he felt this way.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Because Orientalism is really complex because you have both of
the like Orientalists like, oh, we're going to go over
there and steal all your mummies and smoke them, and
that's like coming from like power, I would smoke a mummy.
I would smoke a mummy. Mar no fair. But there's
also just this like well that's there's this also kind
of putting on a pedestal, which is also not always great,

(41:49):
but there's like like there's a weed.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
No, it's problematic too, but yeah, it's he and he's
from the web side of things right now. Once he
becomes a graduate student, his enjoyment of school improves mark
because the pedagogical style and that part of Oxford once
you hit your graduate era, instead of just being like
you have to learn and memorize these things we say,
which is just torture. For Lawrence, it's like, hey, what

(42:12):
are you interested in? Our job as your advisors is
to find the areas of interest you're in and like
figure out why working with you ways that you can
contribute to academia that you can move and like that
Lawrence excels in right once, that's what school is. He
does very well. So Lawrence and his advisor talk themselves
into an idea for how he might combine his desire

(42:33):
to travel further east, which had been sparked by his
first vision of the Greek shoreline, and his obsessive interest
in medieval architecture. A major debate at the time centered
around the presence of castles built by European crusaders in
the Middle East that had structures in common with some
of the structure scene in classical medieval European castles, and

(42:53):
the question was does this mean that Europeans introduced certain
architectural methods to the Arab world or was it the
reverse Crusaders learned local techniques from you know, local people
in you know, the Arab world during the crusades and
then took them home with them, right, And so medieval

(43:13):
castles are actually, in large part an example of knowledge
transfer from the Muslim world to the West, right, right,
which is I think largely true. It's agreed obviously, like
this is the kind of thing that's more complicated than
we're going to exhaustively like tease out an episode of
Behind the Bastards a podcast by two people who don't
know much about my medieval architecture. But Lawrence, I think

(43:37):
the agreement is that he was onto something here, right,
And obviously he's not the one who started this idea,
other people had proposed it. But he's going to actually
contribute significantly to like historia historological debate in this measure, right,
So Satin writes, quote, Lawrence decided to take a broader
view of the topic and to question whether the skill
to build a castle, not just a pointy arch, had

(43:59):
come from the East. The accepted view championed at that
time by Charles Ohmann, professor of history at Oxford, was
that the Europeans marched east with hardly any understanding of
fortifications and learned from the Byzantines how to build the
magnificent castles they have left in the levant. According to Aman,
much of what Lawrence had admired in France had its
origins elsewhere, but neither ormand Know any of the others,

(44:20):
nor any of the other scholars who had written about
this period had traveled to Syria and Palestine to see
the buildings, relying instead on historical documents for evidence to
support their theories. Now, this is something that's going to
be a thing for Lawrence's whole working life, which is
that he's willing to go places other people of his
status aren't. And he always prefers to do the most difficult,

(44:42):
dangerous version of any task set before him. Right. He
is not someone who is like comfortable making inferences or
assumptions without actually getting his hands dirty. So he decides,
I'm going to go to the Middle East to take
part specifically, I'm going to go to Turkey to take
part in, you know, a dig in some of these
classical ruins, and I'm going.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
To start that.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Before I go over to Turkey, I'm gonna do a
walking tour of Syria. Now, he has warned ahead of time,
no one, no European does this, right, it's too hot,
it's too dangerous. You need a guide in servants to
carry your luggage and whatnot. And Lawrence is like, no,
I'm just going to walk on my own, right, I'm
gonna carry my own shit, and like I'm gonna I'm

(45:27):
going to.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Invent backpacking as a hobby. Yeah, yeah, So weirds are
we talking about here?

Speaker 3 (45:32):
We are talking nineteen oh six, Okay, yeah, so he
says he's gonna do this, and his Yeah, his advisors
like Europeans don't walk in Syria, and Lawrence's response is,
well I do. Which hard not to like this guy,
I know. So he takes his first steps into the
Arab world during a fascinating time in relations between his

(45:53):
country and the end. Again, when I say the air world,
Syria is the Arab world. Obviously Turkey is not. Turks
are not Arabs, I want to be clear that I'm
not like conflating the two. I'm gonna be using a
lot of terms that like, because he travels extensively in
the Middle East. He travels extensively in the Near East,
which is more accurate to call Turkey. Yeah, and he travels.

(46:14):
He spends a lot of time both on the Arab
Peninsula and in modern day Syria and Iraq. Right, that's
all of his like stomping grounds. But at this stage
he's kind of walking through Syria, going through the Holy
Land and getting to like kind of the Ottoman heartland, right, Like,
that's the gist of this trip. And he takes this
during a fascinating time in relations between his country and

(46:37):
the Ottoman Empire, which was well in decline by the
mid eighteen hundreds, riven by unrest and constantly picked at
by expansionist csars and quarrelsome Serbs. By eighteen fifty four,
Great Britain had actually come into the Crimean War on
the side of the Ottomans, not because like, oh, they're
being picked on, but because, like, if the Ottomans fall

(46:58):
and Russia, you know, stins the Russian Empire across like
fucking Constantinople, then we don't have a bulwark against this
country that we see as a geopolitical rival. Right.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
You're saying that the Western Powers need to have an
ally in the.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
Yes, in the struggle against Russia. Yes, and in this
case it's the Ottomans. The British had another reason for
wanting good relations with the Ottomans that's even more selfish,
which is that the Sultan of the Empire, and again
this is a Turk is the Khalif of Islam. Right now,
this does not in fact make him. The way a
lot of Europeans take this is that like he's the

(47:36):
Pope of Islam, right, which is kind of the case,
but also really not the case in the hearts of
most Muslims. Because like a shitload of the Muslim population
or Arab right, and so they both are co religionists
with the Khalif and also are oppressed and ruled by
the Turks and not happy with it necessarily.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Right, starting to get kind of more of the rise
of Turkish nationalists. I'm during this period.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
Turkish nationalism and Arab nationalism is starting. I meant to say, yes, well,
I mean Turkish nationalism is also a major factor.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
And what's happening, yeah, right, but in like opposite directions, right, Yeah,
the Arab nationalism is it tenants against y.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
And as we're talking about, we'll talk about the Turkish
nationalism is like everyone in this entire wide region of
the world are Turks. There are no Arabs, there are
no Kurds, You're just mountain Turks.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
Have lost your.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
Language, right, which a lot of Turkish people still still
argue for today. It's kind of a major factor in
what's happening in Rajava. So anyway, a lot of Europeans assume, oh,
this Khalif is like the king of Islam, and so
you know, we have India, the Gym and the crown
of the British Empire with this massive Muslim population, and
we have constant issues with uprisings, and if the Khalif

(48:48):
gets pissed at us, he might call for a jihad
from these Indian Muslims, and who knows what will happen then, right,
which is not like a complete non factor as a threat,
But they're also vastly stating the degree of influence the
caliph has right in fucking India. So this is the
status quo for a while, Like we're gonna, you know,

(49:10):
keep propping up the Ottoman Empire because of these reasons
that are useful for our own empire. But then things
start to change in eighteen sixty nine, which is when
the Suez Canal opens in Egypt. One reason that the
British Empire had needed the Ottomans to remain semi stable
was that we need them in order to provide us
with a way to quickly and easily take goods from

(49:32):
the East and the Europe and vice versa.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Right, do you say goods and services? Goods and services? Right?

Speaker 3 (49:37):
Speaking of goods and services, you know who else takes
every product that sponsored on this show travels through the
Ottoman Empire, you know, including it's extremely expensive. Yeah, yeah,
it's ruining the time stream. We have time cup problems
every fucking week, always trying to bring various weight loss
pills and gambling apps through the Ottoman Empire. And you know,

(49:58):
how do Ottomans for the eighteen nineties feel about Chumba Casino.
They don't love it, Margaret, they don't love Chumpa Casino.
They're broadly positive about the Trump sneakers though. Anyway, here's
some ads, So we're back. So yeah, the British, you know,

(50:23):
get the sus Canal going, and suddenly they don't really
need the Ottoman Empire to be a stable in order
to like move goods and services, right, and they, you know,
they make a shitload of money off the canal, and
once they're kind of fatted on canal profits, they stop
really caring about the Sultan and like propping his bullshit up.
And as a result, the British kind of snooze through.
Another Russian invasion of Ottoman territory. Now this isn't the

(50:46):
ottomanive heartland. It's the Balkans, right, which you have to
remember much of the Balkans, you know, the territory that
becomes like Yugoslavia during the twenty the later twentieth century
is Ottoman territory in this period of time. And so
the Russians invade the Balkans and you know, eighteen eighty
two or the Russians invade the Balkans, and like, you know,

(51:07):
the Brits don't do anything. And then in eighteen eighty
two the British occupy Egypt. Near the end of the century,
Greece and the Ottomans go to war, and war spreads
quickly in this connected world. British colonial figures in India
are shocked and horrified when Indian Muslims start demonstrating in
support of the Ottoman side of the war, and they
take this as, oh, you know, the Khalif, their leader

(51:29):
has called them to action. I think what this actually
is is that like Muslims in India sympathized with their
co religionists in a very natural way in a war
against the West's right. I think that's more accurate than like, ah,
the Khalif ordered them and they have to follow him.
I want to quote now from a book called Setting
the Desert on a Fire by James Barr, and this

(51:50):
is talking about like European coverage of the war against Greece.
At the times, Valentine Chirol believed that the Sultan's power
as khalif gave him a disturbing and disruptive political influence worldwide.
He and others feared that the Sultan would use his
position to upset the stability of Britain's Eastern Empire. Now
this is not how things worse work out. And this

(52:10):
is probably we know, now probably fair to call this
a silly and racist assumption. But you know who else
is silly and racist, Margaret not our sponsors Germans. And
while the British are like, oh my god, what if
the Caliph incites a rebellion in India, the Germans are
also looking and seeing England as a geopolitical enemy and going,
oh my god, what if we could get the Sultan

(52:32):
to incite a rebellion in India? Or you know, that
could really help us with our British people problem. So
the Germans start increasingly sinking resources into making the Ottomans
their friends. They send engineers and metal workers to help
the Sultan build railways, and they send military officers to
modernize his army.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
And this is you know that if tankies existed, then
they'd be supporting the Germans because they'd be like, well,
at least they're against the British.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Anti imperialist icons, the Kaiser's Germany. Yeah, yeah, there's no
genocide in Namibia. What are you talking about? No Armenians
were ever killed by the Turks now anti Western, anti
imperialist icons, the Turkish Empire.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
I know a bit about how the Germans are going
to be involved in the Armenian genocide in a lastic Germans.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
Yeah, and we're not gonna get We'll be talking a
little bit about that, not enough. But this isn't a
story primarily about that. But that is happening, right. This
is the situation in the Muslim world. When Te Lawrence
embarks on his first journey there in June of nineteen
oh nine, a steamership takes him to the port of
Jedda in modern days Saudi Arabia now Later, during the

(53:39):
second landing in Jedda in nineteen sixteen, Lawrence writes about
the experience of taking this steamership to Jetta, and this
is such a beautiful passage that I just have to
read it. When we at last anchored in the outer
harbor off the White Town, hung between the blazing sky
and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled
over the wide lagoon. Then the heat of Arabia came

(54:01):
out like a drawn sword and struck a speechless.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
He clearly cares about living an esthetic life. Yes, that's
everything to him, but also, like you were talking about earlier,
how he still wants I'm sure he's going to fail
a whole bunch of times, but he wants to do
what's right in any given situation. Well at the same time, yeah,
trying to live up a beautiful life regardless of the
yes cost to his health. And that's that's fascinating.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
Yeah, it is. And I can tell you just from
extensively traveling in this similar region, that description of like
the heat like a drawn sword striking you in the face,
I identify with quite a lot like that. Is That
is how it like, especially that first getting off the
plane in a rack and stepping outside, for it is
it does feel like you've been assaulted suddenly. It's like

(54:51):
a violent experience.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Is a dry a wet heat? It is a dry heat. Yes.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
From Jetta, he covered more than eleven hundred miles, mostly
on foot in a ride up for the Guardian Laura
Feigel describes his journey. Lawrence wandered around Syria clad fastidiously
in a bespoke suit and hobnailed boots. He've amused the
natives with his insistence on walking, even when accompanied by
guides on horseback. He was especially English in his understated

(55:20):
response to hardship. I've had the delay of four attacks
of malaria when I had only reckoned on two. He
complained to his mother, informing her nonchalantly that he had
been robbed and rather snatched up by a group of
armed robbers just casually, like nearly died of malaria, got
beaten by bandits.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Anyway, how are you doing, mom? That is the one
the British characteristic that like endurates. It's pretty good. It's
pretty good. Not everyone should have it, but the keep
calm and carry on while you're being while you're literally
the only nache power of fighting the Nazis. Yeah, sometimes
you just need the like anxious, so stiff upper lip.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
I mean, it's part of why I've spent most of
my career reporting alongside British journalists. When like you're really
in the shit, it's very helpful to have a brit
next to you, they're very good. Yea, yeah, they call
them a word that sounds like a slur, but it's not.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
So.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
His experience entered. His experience of this time where he's
like nearly dying while walking eleven hundred miles, is completely positive.
He is just he falls madly in love with the
local culture, with particularly like these Arabs that he's starting
to meet as he begins his journey through that portion
of the Ottoman Empire, and he's particularly taken by their

(56:42):
treatment of him as a guest. He writes home to
his father, this is a glorious country for wandering in,
for hospitality is something more than a name. Setting aside
the American and English missionaries who take care of me
in the most fatherly or motherly way, they have all
so far been as good as they can be. There
are the common people, each one ready to receive one
for a night and allow me to share in their meals,

(57:04):
and without a thought of payment from a traveler on foot.
It is so pleasant, for they have a very attractive
kind of native dignity, and there's a you know, there's
Orientalism going on in that passage. But this is also
something if you travel in this region of the world
today you will experience, which is the treatment of guests
is It's deeper than just Islam. It's something that goes

(57:26):
back very far in that region of the world, and
it is a profound experience.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
I don't know how else to.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
Describe it, but like the welcome you are in people's homes,
people like fighting over hosting you and putting you up
through the night. Like it's a very unique experience. And
I'm not surprised he's taken by it. I know exactly
how he feels here, and there is this feeling of
belonging that's totally different from like southern hospitality right where

(57:52):
people will offer you things, but it's kind of rude
generally to take them. It's more a matter of like,
like you all, it's almost sometimes a problem for you.
The degree to which people are offering you meals in
hospitality because like you have, you have a schedule to keep,
You've got to get places right.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
And what he says, it goes beyond Islam. I know
that it's a fundamental concept in Islam is taking.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
Yes, it's like but but it's a fundamental concept in
Islam because that was present in the cultures of the
region before Islam existed. Right, I'm not saying like Islam stolen.
I'm saying that like it is a part of Islam,
because it's been a part of the culture for.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
Much The people who made Islam already had that going on, right, Right, that's.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Now Lawrence seems to have been drawn in part to
the feeling of belonging that he felt here because he'd
never felt like he belonged at home, in part because
he's haunted by his status as an illegitimate child, so
part of the people here everywhere he goes because he
glues pospet together. Right. He never he doesn't feel like
he belongs. He feels like a fraud and impostor, he's bullied,
and then he goes to this place where everyone's extremely

(58:56):
happy to see him and nice to him, and he
feels like he has a place to be. Right now,
there's also imperialist impulses right that are influenced by his
obsession with the Crusades. Schneider writes, quote, Lawrence began to
see the Arab world in a new way and would
soon come to believe that he could move and bind
it to his will, that his Crusader musings were more

(59:17):
than an adolescent fantasy. We're starting to see some of
like the darker side growing as he begins to understand,
he also starts to think about how I can manipulate
and change things here. So Lawrence has this first trip
and he has a wonderful time. He returns home with
his documentation of these different like structures he's seen from
the Crusades, and he graduates from Oxford. Right. He makes

(59:40):
several more trips to France to work for the Ashmolean Museum,
but he remains obsessed with the East. Right, and in
late nineteen ten, he succeeds in setting up an apprenticeship
and an archaeological dig in Turkey. To prepare, he traveled
to Beroot that Christmas and spent two months in Lebanon
being tutored in Arabic. Schneider writes that sixty years later,

(01:00:01):
his Arabic teacher recalled him as someone who quote lived
rather in the spirit than in the body. Right, that's
her description of Lawrence from meeting him. Okay, Now, many
descriptions of Lawrence paint this picture of him as almost
a monk, this severe aesthetic philosopher type I think some
of that is conscious because he admires these monks who
are like a major part of the transmission of the

(01:00:23):
medieval history. That is such an obsession to him. Right.
That said, he is not one of these guys who's
like this that almost gives you this picture of him
as someone who's like unknown and unknowable. That's not him
at all. In fact, he is incredibly popular with the
local Arab diggers that he meets in. You know, some
are Arabs, some are Turks, but like this is like

(01:00:47):
in a rural region of Anatolia, right, and a lot
of these guys, these very like dirt poor diggers, really
identify with Lawrence because he's not like the other europe
and that he doesn't just sit around and wait for
other people to do work for him. He digs as
hard as anyone else on the team.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
He's actually useful and he's committed to not just like
sitting around while other people do shit. Snyder writes, quote.
A typical example of this aspect of Lawrence's leadership occurred
in June Today. I cured a man of compound scorpion
bite by a few drops of ammonia. For that, I
have a fame above Thompson's as hakim doctor and as
a magician who can conjure devils into water. His role

(01:01:29):
as camp position would be put to good use, for
in June of nineteen twelve, a severe outbreak of cholera
struck the Aleppo area, and saw Lawrence helping the local
population deal with the problem through the remainder of the summer.
Lawrence also adopted local garb, dressing in a Kurdish belt
and attiring himself like the diggers he'd gotten to know.

(01:01:50):
He found their clothing much more practical than what he
bought from Oxford, and he wrote of his Western colleagues,
the foreigners came out here always to teach, whereas they
had much better to learn. You can see why this
guy's well liked, you know now. In his books Setting
the Desert on Fire, Barr also gives a much again,

(01:02:10):
if you want a little bit less of the like
you know, agent of history moving nobly through time picture,
here's a much more fun account of Lawrence's behavior at
this time. He injected these excavations with an excitement not
usually associated with the world of archaeology by firing his
pistol in the air. Whatever an interesting find was unearthed.
This is also what makes him popular. He loves shooting

(01:02:32):
his gun in the air whenever he's.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
In a good mood. In honorary American, honorary American.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
Yeah you have, I am declaring you with citizen of
the State of Texas, Lawrence. Your tin gallon hat is
in the mail. Now. The digging season is not a
year round thing, yet Lawrence could always be counted to
hang around long after all the other foreigners had left.
He just doesn't want to leave when the digging is done.
One of his English colleagues later wrote, I never quite

(01:03:01):
fathomed why Lawrence was still at Carkemish when the digs
were closed down, but I gathered that it was partly
from choice and partly from economy. He used to spend
his time wandering around in Arab dress, sometimes for days
at a time, storing his phenomenal memory with scraps of
local knowledge, which came in very useful later on. When
he was not doing this, he was trying to puzzle
out the Hittite inscriptions or target shooting with a long

(01:03:22):
mouser pistol. I amused myself by competing with him at
both of these games.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
So he's just a fun dude.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
He likes shooting, he likes puzzling out Hittite inscriptions, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Yeah, and he wants to dress like the locals and
he wants to see where he's because when he's walking
around in his like suit and hobnail shoes and the desert,
you're like, yeah, oh man, he's like one of those
like young Republican kids.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
Yeah. No, he just didn't know a better way. And
like a big part of it is like it's just
much more reasonable to be dressed that way in the
in this part of the world like he is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
He is car chemist.

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
He's like right on the border of a you know,
modern day Turkey, like the far southern Turkey and Syria. Right,
So this is it's not far from like some of
the area. It's not it's like not far from well
actually no, sorry it is, but like yeah, it's far
from Haseka, but like yeah, he so he's right in
you know, this is like the Turks would say, part

(01:04:22):
of the Turkish heartland, but this is like the Arab world,
the Kurdish world. It's kind of like right in the
middle of all of that, and it's just not a
reasonable place to wear a three piece suit all summer.
The garb that the locals wear as much more comfortable,
especially if you're digging all day.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
It's compared to the thing that was developed on a
terrible island where the sun never want an empire where
the sun never sets is yeah, live on an island
where it doesn't.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Yeah, exactly. So Lawrence was to spend the next three
years of his life in Turkey as much as possible.
This was, by every credible account, the happiest period of
his life. And it is also where we get the
first claims that he was a bastard, right specifically the
claim that he was a pedophile or some sort of groomer.
Right now, I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't

(01:05:12):
agree with this interpretation, but I'm I'm gonna make the
case for it. I'm going to explain to you why
people talk about this. So the gist of it is
that while Lawrence was participating in this dig a fourteen
year old boy named Salim Ahmed was hired on as
a donkey boy. In the parlance of the times, this
means he helped lead donkey trains of supplies to the diggers. Salim,

(01:05:34):
nicknamed Dahum or the little dark One by his fellows,
became fast friends with Lawrence. We don't know precisely why,
but their bond deepened when Lawrence caught dysentery later that year,
and Dome cared for him until he got better. The
two traveled to Aleppo together, and Lawrence began promoting his
young friend to higher positions and ultimately made Dahom his assistant.

(01:05:56):
While on the dig, the two lived in the same
house and seemed to take particular place you're in wearing
each other's clothes. This is something that everyone will say
about them, is like they would exchange outfits and dressed
like each other. They have pictures taken where they're dressed
in identical outfits, like dressed as each other, and by
all accounts they are inseparable. Right and again, this is like,

(01:06:16):
I think he's fourteen, you know, to sixteen during the
period where they're spending most of their time together, and
Lawrence is in his twenties, so this is potentially very problematic,
right Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson described Lawrence as having a
quote almost fatherly concern for the boy. One of his
colleagues at the dig. Leonard Woolley went much further after

(01:06:37):
Lawrence became famous. He made public allegations that Lawrence had
convinced quote Domed to live with him and got him
to pose as a model for a queer crouching figure,
which he carved in the soft local limestone. To make
an image was bad enough in this way, but to
portray a naked figure was proof to them the local
arabs of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence

(01:06:58):
was widely spread and firmly believed. So Willie's allegation is
that these two were homosexual lovers and like the locals
found out about it because he was carving an image
of Dome in local naked and local limestone. Now again,
Dome would have been fifteen or sixteen, and at the
time that is not the same as fifteen or sixteen today. Again,

(01:07:22):
and like Germany, you're an adult at fourteen. But I
donuld say that to mitigate potential pedophilia, just to say
like that is why his countrymen who criticized him for
who like he was homosexual, they're not calling him pedophile
because that's not how they would have seen this, right,
they would have seen this as a gay relationship. That's
not how we see it. I don't think we're wrong
in seeing it differently. But he is not written about

(01:07:44):
by people who criticize him as his time as a pedophile.
He's written about as a homosexual, which is a severe
criminal offense in the UK at the time. Right, if
he had been convicted of this, he would have gone
to prison.

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Well, it's interesting is because for centuries, yeah, gay men
and Britain would go to the Ottoman Empire because it
was like more accepted to be gay there and just
a friendlier place. But obviously I think that started to
fade around this time. Actually I've heard because of Western influence,

(01:08:17):
but I'm not I've been more certain about things.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
It's a bit more. It's too complicated for us to
get into and detail. But one aspect of this that
I think was an aspect of why it was friendlier
in the autom An Empire, and it's an aspect of
how everyone looks at it and how like Lawrence is famous,
he's not homophobic, right, he has friends who are gay
that he knows are gay, and he does not seem
to have any issue with this. But also I don't

(01:08:40):
know that he would have I don't think he had
any kind of sexual relationship with Doom to like skip
ahead here. But I don't know that he would have
felt that was wrong, because he would have looked at
it in the way that like he saw and in
the way like ancient Greeks had these relationships between older
men and their younger wards. Right, that is probably how

(01:09:00):
he would have seen it, right, That.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Makes sense to me.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):
That's not what I think is going on here. Now.
There are allegations later in his career from adult colleagues
in the army who claimed that Lawrence asked them to
whip him, right, and so these have kind of been
merged in the public mind with some of these rumors
that he and Doom had a sexual relationship. And a
good example of how this comes down in casual.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
History is a.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
Quote from a very bad listical I found called great
People who were also perverts, which I found on this
terrible shitty we clickbait website called backloll.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
The artic going to make a crack com joke. But no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
No no, I don't know. Maybe they stole this from us,
I don't know. Lawrence was very famous for playing Lawrence
of Arabia pictured here a great actor. Not many know
that he was also a great archaeologist. I think they're
confusing him with Peter O'Toole here, so I think we
would have caught that. At Cracked, it was said that
Lawrence didn't go much for relationships at all, then suddenly
he fell in love with a young boy who was underage.

(01:10:00):
He also loved to be whipped hard on his backside,
so definitely had strong leanings towards masochism. A pedophile at
a masochist is a far cry from the over glamorized,
glamorized image people have him as a great actor. Do
you not know Lawrence was a real prayer. He's not
Peter O'Toole. I don't think Peter O'Toole was a pedophile,
what like? Okay, Anyway, after that, this is a separate person.

(01:10:22):
You have some serious misconceptions about the history here.

Speaker 1 (01:10:26):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
A different article I found on a better website, Cleohistory,
a dot of work, made the equally confusing decision to
ignore the particulars of Dohome's age and depict his relationship
with Lawrence as more of a thwarted gay love affair.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
While at Carchemish, he formed a particularly close bond with
a handsome young Arab water boy, whom Lawrence once took
on a long visit to Oxford. However, given the reticences
of the time, it seems impossible to finally get a
clear picture of Lawrence's romantic life.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Now I'm gonna.

Speaker 3 (01:10:56):
Skip to the end here and say there's no evidence
that Lawrence had sex with Dahoum, or that he even
wanted to. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that
Lawrence ever chose to engage in sexual activity with any
person over the course of his entire life. Anthony Satin writes,
Lawrence said he never had a sexual relationship, and most

(01:11:17):
people who knew him found that credible.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Yeah, if he's friends with gay folks, he would have
said it. If he was like nah, yes, sleeping boys.

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
And he does. He describes himself in a letter to
a friend of his who was gay and who he
knew was gay, as this is Lawrence describing himself funnily
made up sexually. And from the context we can see
two things. He was aware of homosexuality and not judgmental
of it, and he did not consider himself gay or straight,

(01:11:44):
and I think probably the best term that fits for
him is a sexual Right now, this is not an
orientation that is well understood even today, and we shouldn't
assume that he would have talked about his sexuality the
way modern day ace people talk about it, right, Right,
this is nineteen eleven, and in any sexuality is pretty
much non existent in the public consciousness, right, he probably

(01:12:04):
would have thought of his own sexuality more like he
thinks of like a monk, someone who has taken a
vow of celibacy, totally right, although he doesn't write about
having any particular sexual desires, and in fact, I m Forster,
the gay friend that he wrote to about his own sexuality,
seems to have interpreted Lawrence's feelings towards Dahome as an
unconsummated love affair. But I think that's Forster kind of

(01:12:25):
pushing some of his own sexuality onto Lawrence.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
Lawrence describes himself as kind of celibate. He writes repeatedly
about his love for Dome, but in a manner more
complicated than just like fatherly affection, but also not in
a way that sounds like lust to me. And here's
Satin again. Ten years later, when Lawrence referred to his
friendship with Doome, he talked of it as one in
which there was such intimacy and mutual understanding that they

(01:12:52):
had said all two people could say to each other.
This freed them to work or rest together for hours
without speaking. Experienced that sense of calm and trust with
very few people in his life. It was not obvious
that one of them would be a donkey boy from Jerablas.
In the summer of nineteen thirteen, the two of them
spent most days and evenings together working at the dig,

(01:13:14):
swimming in the euphrates, cleaning and drawing, photographing and cataloging
the finds in the courtyard or a large sitting room
of the expedition house, even while Lawrence was busy writing
of his adventures in Seven Pillars of Islam. And you
know by this characterization, Yeah, they were two people who
had a profound bond, but not a sexual one. And like,

(01:13:35):
why did he carve that sculpture? Well, because he liked sculptures, right,
and he was raised on sculptures of the naked human
form that he didn't see as sexual. Because this is
not a guy who particularly had any sexual feeling probably right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
It's interesting because I was talking to my sister about
this one time, and we were talking about the whole
historically close friends thing and how like, you know, we
kind of we go back in time and say, like, oh,
all of these women were lesbians, like all the ones
who just had historically close friends that they lived with
a roommates. And it's hard because we just actually don't
know in most circumstances, like sometimes we do we have

(01:14:10):
like professions of sexual love between the two, but like
sometimes historically close friends were just historically close friends in
a way that also doesn't map to any current understanding
of sexuality that we know we operate with today.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
And all I can say is, you know, for one thing,
that colleague who initially made the allegations that Lawrence was
gay later in life came to be like, actually, I
think it's probably likely that he never had any kind
of sexual feelings towards Dahom, and Lawrence in his own
letters to his friends with whom he could have been
open if he had what they would have seen as
a homosexual affair, was like, I've never had sex, and

(01:14:48):
I've never really wanted to. And that's how Lawrence talks
about it right now. Lawrence is not a perfectly reliable narrator,
but I just don't see any reason he would have
lied about this. I think he was probably if we're
characterizing him today, he's probably a sexual right And I
want to close with a quote by Satin about Lawrence

(01:15:08):
and Dome. It is impossible to know what Doom thought
of these changes to his life. He was obviously flattered
that Lawrence was taking an interest in him well. The
extra money and new status helped set him apart in
the village. A range of possibilities was opening through his
growing ability to read and write Arabic. But only occasionally
can we hear Doom's voice with any clarity. One moment
was at ibin Wardani, but the most persuasive was his

(01:15:31):
answer to Miss Farida's question in the summer of nineteen
twelve of why he loved Lawrence. He did so, he replied,
because Lawrence was brother, friend and leader, because he could
do things better than them, because he was courageous, playful, humorous,
and perhaps more important to them, because they knew he
cared for them. And I think that that if you're
looking for like is he apanas well, that's not what

(01:15:52):
Doom says. Doom says he was like a brother, and
I think that's probably a better much. That's probably the
right way to look at this relationship hip.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Wow, Okay, anyway, so far, the only way in which
he's a bastard is in a literal sense.

Speaker 3 (01:16:07):
Yeah, he's a bastard literally a little bit of he
does some orientalizing right in. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, you know,
but like not in a way that would earn him
an episode here. He's probably not a pedophile kind of
maybe an ace icon Lawrence of Arabia.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:21):
I had always my dad had always told me when
we would watch the movie together, that he had been gay,
and I've come to find that, like there's not really
any evidence for that. Like he was cool with gay people,
but like there's not really any evidence that he was gay.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
Do you think that was your dad like trying to
be chill about a gay person, because he sounds like
your dad liked Lawrence Ville.

Speaker 3 (01:16:40):
Yeah, it may have been. It was also just like
that had that was the understanding, the common understanding, and
I think that still is. I think most people would
still say, oh, he was gay, right, Like I think
that is still how most people think of this, I
mean in a weird way.

Speaker 2 (01:16:53):
Also, because I've been reading a whole bunch recently about
some of the early Protestant ideas around sexuality and and
not making kids and not getting married. Is all sort
of equally gay, yeah, to a certain degree. So like
monks and priests were sort of gay to the Protestants

(01:17:14):
because they like weren't having weren't getting married and having kids. Yeah,
you know, And so I could see I'm always saying this,
there's a version of you know, queerness whatever, that there's
a reason that Ace is in the queer umbrella now,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
Yeah? Absolutely? All right, Well, so, uh that's it. That's
the episode.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
All right, we did it, Joe mag Pie. Do you
have anything you want to plug? Well, if you like
history about complicated people who mostly aren't bad, then I
have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
which is on this little known network called cool Zone Media,
and you can listen to it. And it's probably too

(01:18:02):
late to catch me on tour when you're listening to this,
but maybe maybe it's not. Maybe I'll be on a
different tour by the time you hear this, And which case,
you can find me there. But just go listen to
the cool people did cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):
Listen to cool people who did cool stuff, and you know, uh,
launch an insurgent war I don't care against two do
it somewhere. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
This is going to sound really weird depending on what
happens next week.

Speaker 3 (01:18:30):
Yeah, that's my advice to you, no matter where you
are in the world, go start some shit you know
or don't or don't legally don't.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio 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 dot com slash

(01:19:03):
at Behind the Bastards

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War