THE EVOLUTION OF A REVOLT 

by T. E. Lawrence 

(Late Lieu&-Colonel General Staff, E.E.F.) 

:/1x 8,.,11,‘l 
I 
THE EVOLUTION OF A Q 

REVOLT 

I BY T. E. LAWRENCE 

@ATE LIEUT.-COLONEL GEI’+4ERAL STAFF, E.E.F.) 

The Arab Revolt began in June, 1916, with an Arab 

i offensive, a surprise attack by the half-armed and 

: inexperienced tribesmen upon the Turkish garrisons in 

I Medina and about Mecca. They had no success, and after a 

few days’ effort they withdrew out of range of the fort 

,I artillery, and began a blockade. This method forced the early 

surrender of Mecca, whose road communications were too 

1 long and rough to be held by the Turks. Medina, however, 

; was linked by railway to the Turkish main Army in Syria, and, 

thanks to their superior numbers and equipment, the Turks 

were able in a week’s fighting to restore the line and reinforce 

, the temporarily-besieged garrison there. The Arab forces 

j which had attacked it fell back gradually as the Turks became 

more offensive, and at last moved fifty miles south-west into 

( the hills, and there took up a position across the main road to 

i Mecca. 

At this point the campaign stood still for many weeks, 

while both sides breathed, and the Turks prepared to take the 

initiative, by sending an expeditionary force to Mecca, to 

crush the revolt where it had started. They moved an army 

corps to Median by rail, and strengthened it beyond 

establishment with guns, cars, aeroplanes, machine guns, and 

quantities of horse, mule and camel 9ranspor-t. Then they 

began to advance down the main western road from Medina 

to Mecca. The total distance was about two hundred and fifty 

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miles. The first fifty miles were easy: then came a belt of 

hills twenty miles wide, in which were Feisal’s tribesmen 

standing on the defensive: after the hills was a level stretch, 

for seventy miles along the coastal plain to Rabegh, rather 

more than half-way. Rabegh is a little port on the Red Sea, 

with good anchorage for ships. In it was Sherif Ali, Feisal”s 

eldest brother, with more tribal forces, and the beginnings of 

an Arab Regular Army, recruited from officers and men of 

Arab Blood, who had served in the Turkish Army, and were 

now willing to fight against their old masters for their national 

freedom. 

Our military advisers had told us that Rabegh was the key 

of Mecca, since no hostile force could pass along the main 

road without occupying it and watering at its wells under the 

palm trees. Its defence was therefore of the main importance. 

The Navy could cooperate effectively from the harbour, and 

the circle of the palm-groves must be laid out as an 

entrenched position, and held by regular troops. ==Y 

thought that Beduin tribesmen would never be of any value in 

a fixed position, and that therefore an Arab regular force 

must be formed and trained as soon as possible to undertake 

this duty. If the Turks advanced before the new force was 

ready, the British would have to lend a brigade, of British or 

Allied troops, to save the Sherif in his extremity, by 

maintaining this stop-block. 

A personal reconnaissance of the Arab positions, here and 

in the hills where Feisal was, caused me to modify the views 

of the experts slightly. Feisal had some thousands of men, ah 

armed with rifles, rather casual, distrustful fellows, but very 

active and cheerful. They were posted in hills and defiles of 

such natural strength that it seemed to me very improbable 

that the Turks could force them, just by their superior 

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numbers: for in some ways it is easier to defend a range of 

hills against nine or ten thousand men than against nine or 

ten. Accordingly, I reported that the tribesmen (if 

strengthened by light machine guns, and regular officers as 

advisers) should be able to hold up the Turks indefinitely~ 

while the Arab regular force was being created. As was 

almost inevitable in view of the general course of military 

thinking since Napoleon, we all looked only to the regulars to 

win the war. We were obsessed by the dictum of Foch that 

the ethic of modern war is to seek for the enemy’s army, his 

centre of power, and destroy it in battle. Irregulars would not 

attack positions and so they seemed to us incapable of forcing 

a decision. 

While we were training the regulars (of course not sending 

officer or light machine guns to Feisal in the hills meanwhile), 

the Turks suddenly put my appreciation to the test by 

beginning their advance on Mecca. They broke through my 

““impregnable” hills in twenty-four hours, and came forward 

from them towards Rabegh slowly. So they proved to us the 

second theorem of irregular war- namely, that irregular 

troops are as unable to defend a point or line as they are to 

attack it. 

This lesson was received by us quite without gratitude, for 

the Turkish success put us in a critical position. The Rabegh 

force was not capable of repelling the attack of a single 

battalion, much less of a corps. It was nearly impossible to 

send down British troops from Egypt at the moment: nor do 

I think that a single British brigade would have been capable 

of holding all the Rabegh position: nor was the Rabegh 

position indispensable to the Turks: nor would a single Arab 

have remained with the Sherif if he introduced British troops 

into the Hejaz. 

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In the emergency it occurred to me that perhaps the virtue 

of irregulars lay in depth, not in face, and that it had been the 

threat of attack by them upon the Turkish northern flank 

which had made the enemy hesitate for so long. The actual 

Turkish frank ran from their front line to Medina, a distance 

of some fifty miles: but, if we moved towards the Hejaz 

railway behind Medina, we might stretch our threat (and, 

accordingly, their flank) as far, potentially, as Damascus, eight 

hundred miles away to the north. Such a move would farce 

the Turks to the defensive, and we might regain the initiative, 

Anyhow, it seemed our only chance, and so, in January, 1317, 

we took all Feisal’s tribesmen, turned our backs on Mecca, 

Rabegh and the Turks, and marched away north two hundred 

miles to Wejh, thanks to the help of the British Red Sea 

Fleet, which fed and watered us along the coast, and gave us 

gun-power and a landing party at our abjectiveL e ““J 

._ 

This eccentric m 

(who were aIm&t into Rabegh) all the way back to Medina, 

and there they halved their force. Che half took up the 

entrenched position about the cityz which they held until after 

the Armistice. The other half was distributed along the 

railway to defend it against our threat. For the rest of the war 

the Turks stood on the defensive against us, and we won 

advantage aver advantage till, when peace came, we had 

taken thirty-five thousand prisoners, killed and wounded and 

worn out about as many, and occupied a hundred thausand 

square miles of the enemy’s territory, at little loss to ourselves. 

However, we were not then aware that Wejh was our 

turning point. We thought we had come to it to cut the 

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railway, and I was at once sent up country to do this, as a 

means to take Medina, the Turkish headquarters and main 

garrison. On the way up I fell ill, and spent ten days on my 

back in a tent, witbout anything to do except to think about 

war and analyse our hitherto empirical practice for its real 

import. 

I was unfortunately as much in charge of the campaign as I 

pleased, and had had no training in command to fit me for 

such a work. In military theory I was tolerably read, for 

curiosity in Oxford years before had taken me past Napoleon 

to Clausewitz and his school, to Caemrnerer and Moltke, 

Goltz and the recent Frenchmen. These had seemed very 

partial books, and after a look at Jomini and Willisen I had 

found broader principles in the eighteenth century, in Saxe, 

Guibert and their followers. However, Clausewit was 

intellectually so much the master of them ah that unwillingly I 

had come to believe in him. Tactically the only campaigns I 

had studied step by step were the ancient affairs of Hamzibal 

and Belisarius, Mohammed and the Crusades! My interests 

were only in pure theory and I looked everywhere for the 

metaphysical side, the philosophy of war, about which I 

thought a little for some years. Now I was compelled 

suddenly to action, to find an immediate equation between 

my book-reading and our present movements. 

However, the books gave me the aim in war quite pat, 

“the destruction of the organized forces of the enemy” by 

“the one process battle.” Victory could only be purchased by 

blood. This was a hard saying for us, as the Arabs had no 

organized forces, and so a Turkish Foch would have no aim: 

and the Arabs would not endure casualties, so that an Arab 

Clausewitz could not buy his victory. These wise men must be 

talking metaphors, for we were indubitably winning our 

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war . . . and as I thought about it, it dawned on me that we 

had won the Hejaz war We were in occupation of 99 per 

cent. of the Hejaz. The Turks were welcome to the other 

fraction till peace or doomsday showed them the futility of 

clinging to our window pane. This part of the war was over, 

so why bother about Medina? It was no base for us, like 

Rabegh, no threat to the Turks, like Wejh: just a blind alley 

for both. The Turks sat in it on the defensive, immobile, 

eating for food the transport animals which were to have 

moved them to Mecca, but for which there was no pasture in 

their now restricted lines. They were harmless sitting there; if 

we took them prisoner, they would cost us food and guards in 

Egypt: if we drove them out northward into Syria, they would 

join the main Army blocking us in Sinai. Qn all counts they 

were best where they were, and they valued Medina and 

wanted to keep it. Let them! 

This seemed unlike the ritual of war of which Foch had 

been priest, and so I began to hope that there was a 

difference of kind between us and him. He called his modern 

. ” In it two nations professing incompatible 

philosophies set out to try them in the light of force. A 

struggle of two immaterial principIes could only end when the 

supporters of one had no more means of resistance. An 

opinion can be argued with: a conviction is best shot. The 

logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, 

and Salammbo the classical textbook-instance. These were 

the lines of the struggle between France and Germany, but 

not, I thought, between Germany and England, for all efforts 

to make our men hate the enemy just made them hate war, 

and later on by the Armistice we made the Great War fall 

short of the Foch ideal. To me it seemed only a variety of 

war: and I could then see other sorts, as Clausewitz had 

_.. -.- 

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for dynastic reasons, expulsive c-x_- .-... -^-., “.--- 

wars for trading reasons. 

-------...~ ____^_ _ ___^--L. . 

d saw that it was -----_I_ .-__._^_ -...w 

lands in Asia. In 

em very 

much. Yet ‘killing Turks”’ would never be an excuse or aim. 

If they would go quietly, our war would end. If not, we would 

try to drive them out: in the last resort we would be 

compelled to the desperate course of blood, on the maxim of 

“murder” war, but as cheaply as possible for ourselves, since 

the Arabs were fighting for freedom, a pleasure only to be 

tasted by a man alive. 

My own personal duty was command, and I began to 

unravel command and analyse it, both from the point of view 

of strategy, the aim in war, the synoptic regard which sees 

everything by the standard of the whole, and from the point of 

view called tactics, the means towards the strategic end, the 

steps of its staircase. Xn each I found the same elements, one 

algebra&d, one biological, a third psychological. The first 

seemed a pure science, subject to the laws of mathematics, 

without humanity. It dealt with known invariables, fixed 

conditions, space and time, inorganic things like hills and 

climates and railways, with mankind in type-masses too great 

for individual variety, with all artificial aids, and the 

extensions given our faculties by mechanical invention. It was 

essentially formulable. 

In the Arab case the algebraic factor would take first 

account of the area we wished to conquer, and I began idly to 

calculate how many square miles , a . perhaps a hundred and 

forty thousand . . , and how would the Turks defend all 

that e . . no doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we 

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were an army attacking with banners displayed . I . but 

suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a 

thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting 

about like a gas ? Armies were like plants, immobile as a 

whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. 

the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless 

without a target. We would own the ground he sat on, and 

what he could poke his rifle at. 

Then I estimated how many posts they would need to 

contain this attack in depth, sedition putting up her head in 

every unoccupied one of these hundred thousand square 

miles. I knew the Turkish Army inside and out, and allowing 

for its recent extension of faculty by guns and aeroplanes and 

armoured trains, still it seemed it would have need of a 

fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be 

men. The Turks would need six hundred 

climate, railways, deserts, technical weapons could also be 

attached to our interests, if we realized our raw materials and 

were apt with them. The Turk was stupid and would believe 

that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the 

analogy of absolute warfare. Analogy is fudge, anyhow, and 

to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating 

soup with a knife. 

So much for the mathematical element, which I annoyed 

the others by calling hecastics. The s,econd factor was 

biological, the breaking-point, life and death, or better, wear 

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and tear. Bionomics seemed a good name for it. The 

war-philosophers had properly made it an art, and had 

elevated one item in it, “effusion of blood,” to the height of a 

principle. It became humanity in battle, an art touching every 

side of our corporal being, and very war. There was a line of 

variability (man) running through all its estimates. Its 

components were sensitive and illogical, and generals guarded 

themselves by the device of a reserve, the significant medium 

of their art. Goltz had said that when you know the enemy% 

strength, and he is frilly deployed, then you know enough to 

dispense with a reserve. But this is never. There is always 

the possibility of accident, of some flaw in materials, present 

in the general’s mind: and the reserve is unconsciously held 

to meet it, There is a “felt” element in troops, not expressible 

in figures, guessed at by the equivalent of &@z in Plato, and 

the greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly 

happen. Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in 

books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing 

across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be 

ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practising the 

stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex. 

Yet to limit the art to humanity seemed to me an undue 

narrowing down. It must apply to materials as much as to 

explosive was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk. 

The Arab Army just now was equally chary of men and 

materials: of men because they being irregulars were not 

units, but individuals, and an individual casualty is like a 

pebble dropped in water: each may make only a brief hole, 

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but rings of sorrow widen out from them. We could not 

afford casualties. Materials were easier to deal with and put 

straight. It was our obvious duty to make ourselves superior 

in some one branch, gun-cotton or machine guns, or whatever 

could be made most decisive. Foch had laid down the maxim, 

should not seek for his main strength or his weaknesses, but 

for his most accessible material. In railway cutting this would 

be usually an empty stretch of rail. That was a tactical 

success. We might turn the average into a rule (not a 

law-war is antinomian, said Colin), and at length we 

developed an unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy 

at all. This chimed with the numerical plea of never giving 

the enemy% soldier a target. Many Turks on our front had no 

chance all the war to fire a shot at us, and correspondingly we 

knowledge had to be faultless, leaving no room for chance. 

We took more pains in this service than any other staff I saw. 

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The third factor in command seemed to be the 

psychological, that science (Xenophon called it diathetic) of 

which our propaganda is a stained and ignoble part. Some of 

it concerns the crowd, the adjustment of spirit to the point 

where it becomes fit to exploit in action, the prearrangement 

of a changing opinion to a certain end. Some of it deals with 

individuals, and then it becomes a rare art of human kindness, 

transcending, by purposeful emotion., the gradual logical 

sequence of our minds. It considers the capacity for mood of 

our men, their complexities and mutability, and the 

cultivation of what in them profits the intention. We had to 

It was the ethical in war, and the process on which we 

mainly depended for victory on the Arab front. The printing 

P rE;)I. of;G& - -- *----_l_ 

commander, and we, being amateurs in the art of command, 

bkv-war in the atmosphere of the twentieth century, 

and thought of our weapons without prejudice, not 

distinguishing one from another socially. The regular officer 

has the tradition of forty generations of serving soldiers 

behind him, and to him the old weapons are the most 

honoured. We had seldom to concern ourselves with what 

our men did, but much with what they thought, and to us the 

diathetic was more than half command. In Europe it was set 

a little aside and entrusted to men outside the General Staff. 

In Asia we were so weak physically that we could not let the 

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metaphysical weapon rust unused. We had won a province 

when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of 

freedom: the presence or absence of the enemy was a 

secondary matter. 

These reasonings showed me that the idea of assaulting 

Medina, or even of starving it quickly into surrender was not 

in accord with our best strategy. We wanted the enemy to 

stay in Medina, and in every other harmless place, in the 

largest numbers. The factor of food would eventually confine 

him to the railways, but he was welcome to the Hejaz railway, 

and the Trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and 

Damascus and Aleppo railways for the duration of the war, so 

long as he gave us the other nine hundred and ninety-nine 

thousandths of the Arab world. If he showed a disposition to 

evacuate too soon, as a step to concentrating in the small area 

which his numbers could dominate effectively, then we would 

have to try and restore his confidence, not harshly, but by 

Accordingly, I put in a few damages to the line, enough to 

annoy the enemy without making him fear its final 

destruction, and then rode back to Wejh, to explain to my 

chiefs that the Arab war was geographical, and the Turkish 

Army for us an accident, not a target. Our aim was to seek its 

weakest link, and bear only on that till time made the mass of 

it fall. Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, 

men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were 

movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of 

the country, courage. 

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maximum. Tacticallty we must develop a highly mobile, highly 

e of army, of the smallest size, and use it 

successively at distributed points of the Turkish line, to make 

the Turks reinforce their occupying posts beyond the 

economic minimum of twenty men. The power of this 

striking force of ours would not be reckoned merely by its 

strength. The ratio between number and area determined the 

character of the war, and by having five times the mobility of 

the Turks we could be on terms with them with one-fifth their 

number. 

Our success was certain, to be proved by paper and pencil 

as soon as the proportion of space and number had been 

learned. The contest was not physical, but mineral, and so 

battles were a mistake. Ah we won in a battle was the 

ammunition the ene fired off. Our victo 

finesse of the eighteenth century, when men almost forgot 

that war gave licence to murder. We had been swinging out 

on his dictum for a hundred years, and it was time to go back 

a bit again. Battles are impositions on the side which believes 

itself weaker, made unavoidable either by lack of land-room, 

or by the need to defend a material property dearer than the 

lives of soldiers. We had not 

to 

element of our forces were the Beduin irregulars, and not the 

regulars whose role would only be to occupy places to which 

the irregulars had already given access. Our cards were speed 

and time, not hitting power, and these gave us strategical --_“.-.“~^“.~.“---...J 

rather than tactical strength. Range is more to strategy than --_I___. 

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force. The invention of bully-beef has modified land-war 

more profoundly than the invention of gunpowder. 

My chiefs did not follow all these arguments, but gave me 

leave to try my hand after my own fashion. We went off first 

to Akaba, and took it easily. Then we took Tafileh and the 

Dead Sea: then Azrak and Deraa, and finally Damascus, all 

in successive stages worked out consciously on these sick-bed 

theories. The process was to set up ladders of tribes, giving 

us a safe and comfortable route from our sea-bases (Yenbo, 

Wejh or Akaba) to our advanced bases of operation. These 

were sometimes three hundred miies away, a long distance in 

lands without railways or roads, but made short for us by an 

assiduous cultivation of desert-power, control by camel parties 

of the desolate and unmapped wilderness which fibs up ah the 

centre of Arabia, from Mecca to Aleppo and Bagdad. 

&&ecf&gs2,.,cf, @$fjX%%T who commands the sea is at 

great liberty, a&--may%&?aS much or as little of the war as 

he will”: he who commands the desert is equally fortunate. 

Camel raiding-parties, as self-contained as ships, could cruise 

without danger along any part of the enemy’s land-frontier, 

just out of sight of his posts along the edge of cultivation, and 

tap or raid into his lines where it seemed fittest or easiest or 

most profitable, with a sure retreat always behind them into 

an element which the Turks could not enter, We were 

fortified in our freedom of movement by an intimate 

knowledge of the desert-front of Syria, a country peculiarly 

and historically indefensible against attack from the east. I 

had traversed most of it on foot before the war many times, 

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working out the movements of Saladin or Ibrahim Pasha, and, 

as our war-experience deepened, ,we became adepts at that 

_ . I __-,.. I_-- 

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3TTZZ&Xmap. 

Our tactics were always tip and run, not pushes, but 

strokes. We never tried to maintain or improve an advantage, 

but to move off and strike again somewhere else. We used 

the smallest force, in the quickest time, at the farthest place. 

If the action had continued till the enemy had changed his 

dispositions to resist it, we would have been breaking the 

spirit of our fundamental rule of denying him targets. 

The necessary speed and range were attained by the 

extreme frugality of the desert men, and their high efficiency 

when mounted on their she-riding-camels. The camel is an 

intricate animal, and calls for skilled labour in the handling: 

but she yields a remarkable return. We had no system of 

supply: each man was self-contained and carried on the 

saddle from the sea base at which the raid started, six weeks’ 

food for himself. The six-weeks” ration for ordinary men was 

a half-bag of flour, forty-five pounds in weight. Luxurious 

feeders carried some rice also for variety. Each man baked 

for himself, kneading his own flour into unleavened cakes, 

and warming it in the ashes of a fire. We carried about a pint 

of drinking water each, since the camels required to come to 

water on average every three days, and there was no 

advantage in our being richer than our mounts. Some of us 

never drank between wells, but those were hardy men: most 

of us drank a lot at each well, and had a drink during the 

intermediate dry day. In the heat of summer Arabian camels 

will do about two hundred and fifty miles comfortably 

between drinks: and this represented three days’ vigorous 

marching. The country is not so dry as it is painted, and this 

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radius was always more than we needed. Wells are seldom 

more than one hundred miles apart. An easy day’s march was 

fifty miles: an emergency march might be up to one hundred 

and ten miles in the day. 

The six weeks’ food gave us a range of over a thousand 

mi1es out and home, and that (like the pint of water) was 

more than ever we needed, even in so large a country as 

Arabia. It was possible (for me, the camel-novice in the 

Army, ‘“painful’” was a better word) to ride fifteen hundred 

miles in the month without re-victualling, and there was never 

a fear of starvation, for each of us was riding on two hundred 

pounds of potential meat, and when food lacked we would 

stop and eat the weakest of our camels. Exhausted camel is 

poor food, but cheaper killing than a fat one, and we had to 

remember that our future efficiency depended on the number 

of good camels at our disposal. They lived on grazing as we 

marched (we never gave them grain or fodder), and after 

their six weeks on the road they would be worn thin, and have 

to be sent to pasture for some months’ rest, while we called 

out another tribe in replacement, or found fresh riding-beasts. 

We did not hamper ourselves with led-camels. The men 

carried with them a hundred rounds of ammunition and a 

rifle, or else two men would be an “‘automatic” team, dividing 

the gun and its drums between them. They slept as they were, 

in their riding cloaks, and fared well enough till the winter of 

191’7-1918, which caught us on the five-thousand foot hills of 

Edom behind the Dead Sea. Then we lost many men and 

camels frozen to death, or trapped in the snow, which lay over 

all the highlands in deep drifts for weeks, while we vainly 

appealed to Egypt for tents and boots and blankets. In reply 

we were advised that Arabia was a tropical country! 

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The equipment of the raiding parties aimed at simplicity, 

with nevertheless a technical superiority over the Turks in the 

most critical department. We had great quantities of Eight 

machine guns, used not as machine guns, but as automatic 

rifIes, snipers” tools, by men kept deliberately in ignorance of 

their mechanism, so that the speed of action would not be 

hampered by attempts at repair. If a gun jammed, the gunner 

had to throw it away? and go on with his rifle. We made 

another special feature of high explosives, and nearly every 

one in the revolt was qualified by rule of thumb experience in 

demolition work. We invented special methods of our own, 

for rapid work under fire, in the course of our months of 

practice, and before the end were dealing with any quantity of 

track and bridges economically and safely. 

On some occasions we strengthened tribal raids by 

armoured cars, manned by EngliShmen. Armoured cars, once 

they have found a possible track can keep up with a camel 

Party* They are, however, cumbrous and shorter-ranged, 

because of the difficulty of carrying petrol. Therefore we 

seldom used them more than a hundred miles from home. 

On the march to Damascus, when we were nearly four 

hundred miles off our base, we first maintained them by a 

baggage train of petrol-laden camels, and afterwards by the 

help of the Air Force were able to give them further supplies 

by Handley-Page. Cars are magnificent fighting machines, 

and decisive whenever they can come into action on their own 

conditions. But though each has for main principle that of 

“fire in movement,” yet the tactical employments of cars and 

camel-corps are so different that I do not recommend their 

being used in joint operations, except in very special 

circumstances. We found it demoralizing to both, to use 

armoured and unarmoured cavalry together. 

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roduced by permission of the Am 

bumal, 1 West treet, Tatistock, Devon FL19 8DS r!i 

Qudrfersv and Defame 

mted Kingdom. 
The distribution of the raiding parties was unorthodox. It 

was impossible to mix or combine tribes, since they disliked 

or distrusted one another. Likewise we could not use the 

men of one tribe in the territory of another. In consequence, 

we aimed at the widest distribution of forces, in order to have 

the greatest number of raids on hand at once, and we added 

fluidity to their ordinary speed, by using one district on 

Monday, another on Tuesday, a third on Wednesday. This 

much reinforced their natural mobility. It gave us priceless 

advantages in pursuit, for the force renewed itself with fresh 

men in every new tribal area, and gave us always our pristine 

energy. Maximum disorder was in a real sense our 

equilibrium. 

The internal economy of the raiding parties was equahy 

CUriOUS. We aimed at maximum articulation. We were 

serving a common ideal, without tribal emulation, and so we 

could not hope for any eSprit de corps to reinforce our 

motives. Soldiers are made a caste either by being given 

great pay and rewards in money, uniform, or political 

privileges; or, as in England, by being made outcasts, cut off 

from their fellows by contempt. We could not knit man to 

man, for our tribesmen were in arms willingly, by conviction. 

There have been many armies enlisted voluntarily: there 

have been few armies serving voluntarily under such trying 

conditions, for so long a war as ours. Any of the Arabs could 

go home whenever the conviction failed him. Our only 

contract was honour. 

Consequently we had no discipline, in the sense in which 

it is restrictive, submergent of individuality, the lowest 

common denominator of men. In regular armies in peace it 

means the limit of energy attainable by everybody present: it 

is the hunt not of an average, but of an absolute, a 

This article is re rodud by permission of the Am Qu&erIy ami Lk$mce 

Amnat, 1 West x treet, Tavistock, Devon PLl9 SDS G tuted Kingdom, 

18 
10eper-cent. standard, in which the ninety-nine stronger men 

are played down to the level of the worst. The aim is to 

render the unit a unit, and the man a type, in order that their 

effort shall be calculable, their collective output even in grain 

and in bulk. The deeper the discipline, the lower the 

individual efficiency, and the more sure the performance. It 

is a deliberate sacrifice of capacity in order to reduce the 

uncertain element, the bionomic factor, in enlisted humanity, 

and its accompaniment is compound or social war, that form 

in which the man in the fighting line has to be the product of 

the multiplied exertions of the long hierarchy, from workshop 

to supply unit, which maintains him in the field. 

The Arab war was simple and individual. Every enrolled 

man served in the line of battle, and was self-contained. We 

had no lines of communication or labour troops. The 

efficiency of each man was his personal efficiency. We 

thought that in our condition of warfare the sum yielded by 

single men would be at least equal to the product of a 

compound system, and it was certainly easier to adjust to 

tribal life and manners, given elasticity and understanding on 

the part of the commanding officers. Fortunately for our 

chances nearIy every young Englishman has the roots of 

eccentricity in him, and so we got on well enough. Of course 

we used very few Englishmen in the field, not more than one 

per thousand of the Arab troops. A larger proportion would 

have created friction, just because they were foreign bodies 

(pearls if you please) in the oyster: and those who were 

present controlled by influence and advice, by their superior 

knowledge, not by an extraneous authority. 

In practice we did not employ in the firing line the greater 

numbers which the adoption of a ‘“si le”’ system put 

theoretically at our disposal. We preferred to use them in 

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Journal, 1 West treet, Tavistock, Devon PM9 8DS e 

Qu&er& and Defence 

mted Kingdom. 

19 
relay: otherwise our attack would have become too extended. 

Each man had to have liberal work-room. In irregular war if 

two men are together one is being wasted. The moral strain 

Our ideal was to make 

apoleon, in his pregnant 

valuation of the Mamelukes in terms of French soldiers, first 

gave me the idea: Ardant du Picq widened its application: 

the prejudices of historians are generally the richest part of 

their histories, 

not on our quanttty~ .----_ “.I -m.i.“..r ~I_~~.,~~~-- 

excitement of a blood-lust would impair the science of our 

combatants, and our victory depended on our just use of 

speed, concealment, accuracy of fire. Irregular war is far 

more intellectual than a bayonet charge. 

The illiteracy of our forces was not harmful, since we 

worked intentionally in these small numbers and explained 

our plan verbally to every one. Their very illiteracy has 

trained them to a longer memory and a closer hearing of the 

news. Nor were our tactics too subtle, for they had to be 

translated into independent action through the heads of our 

followers, and success was impossible unless most of them 

used their intelligence to forward our conception against the 

moral and material accidents of the path. This dilution of 

tactical ability to the level of the lowest interpreter was 

regrettable, but not all loss. The only alternative would be 

independent enterprise, and a mediocre design, persisted in, 

is grander than a series of brilliant expedients and will 

overcome them in the end. 

By careful persistence, kept strictly within our strength 

and folIowing the spirit of our theories, we were able 

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mduced by pernission of the Am 

Jorurral, 1 West treet, Tavistock, Devon PL19 8DS -c; 

Qume&y and &f2nce 

mted Kingdom. 

20 
eventually to reduce the Turks to helplessness, and complete 

victory seemed to be almost within our si t when General 

Allenby by his immense stroke in Palestine threw the enemy’s 

main forces into hopeless confusion and put an immediate 

end to the Turkish war. We were very happy to have done 

with all our pains, but sometimes since I have felt a private 

regret that his too-greatness deprived me of the opportunity 

of following to the end the dictum of Saxe that a war might be 

won witbout fighting battles. It was an irony of fate to entrust 

this side-show of a side-show, with its opportunity of proving 

or disproving the theory, to an outsider like myself, not 

qualified technically to make the best of it. I would have 

given so much to show that Saxe was the greatest master of 

his kind of war, but now all I can say is that we worked by his 

light for two years, and the work stood. This is a pragmatic 

argument that cannot be wholly derided. 

IJnfortunately our campaigns lacked a historian as much 

as an executant. Now that I try to write down what we did, 

and why, some of our principles look truisms (mankind would 

so rather believe a sophism) and some look contradictory. 

The fault must be either in my exposition or in my 

observation. Savage warfare seems never to have been 

thought out in English from the savage point of view, and the 

Arab revolt would have been a great opportunity for a thinker 

to test its possibilities on a grand scale. Our war was so odd 

and so far away that coy Authority left us to ourselves. We 

had no base machinery, no formal staff, no clerks, no 

govermnent, no telegraphs, no public opinion, no troops of 

British nationality, no honour, no conventions. The 

experiment was a thrilling one, which took ail our wits. We 

believed we would prove irregular war or rebellion to be an 

exact science, and an inevitable success, granted certain 

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J&u&, 1 West &et, Tavistock, Devan PLTSE 8DS I3 

Qua&e@ and Deface 

mted Kingdom. 

21 
factors and if pursued along certain lines. We did not prove 

it, because the war stopped: but here the thesis is: - 

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, 

something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear 

of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, 

or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It 

must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a 

disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine 

of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to 

dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It 

must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but 

sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to 

the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a 

striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The 

few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and 

endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. 

They must have the technical equipment to destroy or 

paralyse the enemy’s organized communications, for irregular 

war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of 

eommunieation” in its extreme degree, of attack where the 

enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in 

the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine 

(the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), vietory will 

rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the 

end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit 

struggle quite in vain.