Reading Scott Anderson’s brilliant book is a simultaneously pleasurable and chilling experience: pleasurable for it is superbly well organized, deeply researched and reads like a novel, one whose denouement you know, yet you sit at the edge of your seat watching the unfolding of the saga; chilling and mesmerizing because it contains the seeds of all that followed, from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War, to the wars of Israel, all the way to 9/11 and beyond. It encompasses so much more than Lawrence in Arabia: it gives you a complete picture of the well-nigh incomprehensible folly that led to the outbreak of the First World War and then was compounded by the criminally insane conduct of it. The madness applied to all governments that were involved. The individuals entrusted with carrying out the details and the actual waging of the war – politicians, generals, oil-explorers, arms merchants -- varied between the venal, the stupid, or the well-meaning but clueless, and they rushed blindly into the mayhem that, once started, seemed impossible to bring to a conclusion. Even the end to the four-year hell, the so-to-speak victory of the Allies comes almost unexpectedly: not by a decisive, brilliantly conducted battle but by the exhausted collapse of an enemy that almost surprises the victors.

It is more than sobering to realize that the War To End All Wars broke out nearly a hundred years ago. One aspect of reading Anderson’s book is to be repeatedly reminded of the direct line that leads from there to here, for instance of the tragicomic search for oil that was still in its infant stages then and yet had all the earmarks of what followed: the planet-wide thirst and hunger for more and more of it that defines much of our life today and the subsequent history of what we fight for. It is bone chilling to read of the Western Powers game-playing and their maneuvering encouragement of an Arab Rebellion against the Ottoman empire, a Rebellion that was, however hapless, successful in a manner of speaking, but of course ultimately betrayed with eventual consequences known to us all. It is mesmerizing to follow the steps of the early Zionists and the seeds of the eventual establishment of a Jewish Homeland.

While T.E.Lawrence himself is a major character in the book, Anderson chooses several individuals whose paths crossed his on occasion, each representing a different aspiration, a different viewpoint of the drama. William Yale the American oil prospector-turned-government agent, Aaron Aaronsohn the agronomist-turned-passionate Zionist, Curt Prufer the German personification of the coming Nazi era, are all players in the same “game”, with different objectives and different outcomes. None, however, can compete in sheer fascination with Lawrence himself, who remains endlessly dissected and portrayed to this day, by himself originally in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and by others in a long stream of books about him, as well as the unsurpassable film by David Lean, “Lawrence of Arabia”. The romance of his enchantment with the Arabs of the desert, his relationship with them, his role in leading the Rebellion, his ambivalence about his own and his country's role in all this, his guilt over the double dealing of the victorious governments at the conclusion of the war, the mystery of his repressed sexuality, his very death, (incongruously by a motorcycle accident, years after having survived repeated deathly peril on the Eastern Front of the War) all make for a True Romance that is far stranger than most fiction. Anderson does a masterly job in keeping him in focus while putting equal emphasis on the parallel stories of the others as well as leading the reader, step by step, into the quagmire that the war had turned into. The description of the British decision-making process – almost farcical -- that result in the attack at Gallipoli and the catastrophic results of that decision are depicted in a way that no prior knowledge or awareness of the subject prepare you for. A bitter pleasure of reading “Lawrence in Arabia” is the frequently recurring moment when, without over-emphasizing it, the author draws parallels to later occurrences, right up to today’s newspaper headlines, so some of the tragic events turn into very dark farce; but farce nevertheless.

My grandfather fought in that war, though on the Western Front of it. There were many family legends about his experiences during those years that were personal. On the larger stage, the carving up of the planet into arbitrary entities by the winners have been one of the major culprits of all subsequent wars, in Europe as well as the Middle East. As Anderson says toward the conclusion of the book: human beings being what they are, there is a great probability that no matter how the hostilities ended, even if the then-much-desired American occupation of Arabia (!) occurred instead of the French and British one, even if Germany had not been penalized and its economy ruined leading directly to Nazism and the Second World War, even if Zionism had taken a different direction, strife, wars, economic and ethnic enmity would have raised its ugly head – that is how we humans seem to be constituted. But those are “what-ifs”; we don’t know where other avenues would have led. What we do know is the one we are on and that is the direct result of the War To End All Wars – and T.E. Lawrence was a major player in it.

I found only one problem with the book: I couldn’t get rid of the image of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence in the epic film. After a while I gave up and accepted the merged mental image of them, giving the slight, short real Lawrence a somewhat more romantic appearance. One wonders what he would have thought of that.