Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War. But there is no doubt that what placed Lawrence himself, and then, in 1926-7, the abridged version of Seven Pillars published as Revolt in the Desert,so brightly in the public eye was the fact that his war seemed to be utterly different from the massacres in the mud which had characterised the Western Front. Britain, though getting offmore lightly than Germany and France, had lost nearly three quarters of a million young men, most of them in conditions like those so vividly evoked in the poetry of Owen and Rosenberg. There were lots of VCs, but in France and Flanders, no epic heroes.Now here was a young man who had survived a sequence of campaigns which recalled the Peninsular feats of Wellington and his zesty offcers, and the schoolboy sagas of Boy's Own Paper and G. A. Henty.
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As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1926,tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East - one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stink and corpses in the disgusting 'hospital' in Damascus. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is no Boys Own Paper tale of Imperial triumph, but a complex work of high literary aspiration which stands in the tradition of Melville and Dostoevsky, and alongside the writings of Yeats, Eliot and joyce.
Author's Preface
Introductory Chapter
INTRODUCTION Foundations of Revolt
BOOK I The Discovery of Feisal
BOOK II Opening the Arab Offensive
BOOK III d Railway Diversion
BOOK IV Extending to Akaba
BOOK V Marking Time
BOOK VI The Raid upon the Bridges
BOOK vII The Dead Sea Campaign
BOOK VIII The Ruin of High Hope
BOOK IX Balancing for a Last Effort
BOOK X The House is Perected
Epilogue
