I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorial… - T. E. Lawrence

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I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only need was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this was at last done in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred killed, by turning to our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.

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About T. E. Lawrence

Thomas Edward Lawrence [T. E. Lawrence] (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935) was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer known for his role in the Arab Revolt and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Commonly referred to as Lawrence of Arabia, he adopted T. E. Shaw as a pseudonym.

Also Known As

Native Name: Thomas Edward Lawrence
Alternative Names: Lawrence of Arabia of Arabia Lawrence John Hume Ross T.E. Lawrence Thomas Edward Shaw
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Additional quotes by T. E. Lawrence

The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themself fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.

"The success of their scheme will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power." <cite>as quoted by R.Elie Mishel, "Lawrence of Arabia, the Unexpected Zionist"</cite>

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