Lawrence of Arabia: Microsoft Digitalizes Ancient 20th c. histories for our perusal

This is the actual painting in the 1919 edition of Nile to Aleppo, long before Lawrence became a Legend

Nile To Aleppo is a monograph by Hector William Dinning, an officer in the Australian Light Horse, whose regiment travelled with Gen. Allenby in his advance during the First World War through Ottoman territories.

It is written in the anecdotal style of Eothen, a classic caravan tale by a young British adventurer of the early 19th c. named Kingslake, whose unbelievable tales of the cruelty and exotic sights and sounds and smells of the Orient captivated a whole generation of young Victorian adventurers.

I leafed though a couple of chapters and the iconoclastic Australian flavor leaps out at the reader. Of particular interest was Dinning's 1918 description of Col. Lawrence, whom he had a chance to accompany on an air journey from a flat field near Deraa, recently in the news for starting an insurrection against the tyrannous government in Damascus under the Alawite dictatorship. Dinning & Lawrence flew over Amman on their air journey back to British lines. Amman was still an operational German aerodrome during this perilous flight and their plane took a couple of hits from what in those early days was called being "archied," WWI jargon for dodging flak or ack-ack. The Brits and peninsular Arabs had allies in the Hauran, or DJebel Druze, always a site of unrest against the Ottoman slave emperors and their Egyptian satrapy under Mohammad Ali.

Dinning's description of the early Lawrence, before he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom and My Desert War are unreservedly positive---especially because Col. Lawrence, unlike the desk-jockey Cairo British HQ in Shepheard's Hotel, was out getting his hands dirty with a bunch of Arabs who adored him unreservedly, although their thieving habits extended to Dinning's plane where one tried to pry his aerial compass off the control panel until he caught him. Lawrence asked Dinning to point out the culprit and chased him down with a musket butt across the buttocks...! This act only seemed to increase the Arabs' admiration for the doughty and tiny non-descript Arab Colonel with the blonde hair and deep blue eyes.

Dinning also describes meeting Lawrence in Shepheard's dressed as a street Arab in deep disguise because, the Col. whispered, there was a huge price on his head by the Ottoman and German spies in Cairo---Lawrence was the only English opponent they feared, until Allenby finally got the grinding gears of the British Expeditionary Force to start moving up the Sinai Peninsula to Jerusalem and finally Damascus.

I haven't got to the part where the Aussie Light Horse liberate Aleppo, the Syrian city I've always wanted to visit. Besides having the best cuisine in the Arab world, the city is a cosmopolitan remnant of the greatness of thousands of years of civilized settlement, going back at least five millennia.

My fascination with "Aurens" goes back to my tour in Saudi Arabia in the mid-seventies when I was the organizer of an expedition up to Medain Saleh and the old Turkish train tracks and right-of-way near Al-Ula. We found a wrecked locomotive from a German factory in a wrecked roundhouse, if you can call it that, near al Ula, where one of my German companions claimed to have spotted a poor wretch hanging from a gallows in the town center while we were otherwise engaged. We did not go back to gape at the spectacle.

Afterwards, we ran into a Saudi prince, related to the Saudi billionaire Walid who now owns a big chunk of News Corp, and his soccer team who were out in the desert with two water trucks and a large collection of tents and zero females. Hmmmm....... We knew the Prince was intelligent because his father, whose name I forget, was Defense Minister at the age of 21 before he ran off to live with Gamal Abdul Nasser as one of the Ara'if, or stray camels, abandoning the Saudi Royal way of life.

On my way back to the main north-south highway we called the Mecca/Medina Hwy, the transmission on my Chevy Suburban went ka-blooey and we were unable to shut off the engine unless we jump-started the car, which was almost impossible in the sandy desert. Many sand tracks by Toyota pickups showed our two cars the way back to the main highway, but afterwards, i was told b some old Aramco US hands that my journey from Medain Saleh and Al-Ula across the trackless [really roadless] wastes was the first by any American they'd ever heard of and possibly by any westerner or even foreigner.

However, the Bedu were driving the same path on a frequent basis, so my sense of achievement wasn't as great as "Aurens" was---parenthetically, my Saudi companion introduced me to an elderly Saudi woman then in purdah who recalled seeing "Aurens" as a little girl back in the teens during the War against the Turks. As this was 1975, she was in her early '70s.

Talk about Six Degrees of Separation----I've got two from Lawrence himself....!