Status Updates From Семь столпов мудрости

The Bedouin “…would follow us, if we endured with them; and played the game according to their rules. The pity was, that we…broke down with exasperation and threw them over, blaming them for what was a fault in our own selves. Such strictures like a general's complaint of bad troops, were in reality a confession of our faulty foresight…”

Time slowly depressed my first, favourable, opinion of Abdulla's character. His constant ailments, which once aroused compassion, became fitter for contempt when their causes were apparent in laziness and self-indulgence. His casual attractive fits of arbitrariness now seemed feeble tyranny disguised as whims; his friendliness became caprice. The leaven of insincerity worked through all the fibres of his being.

My vision of the course of the Arab war was still purblind. I had not seen that the preaching was victory and the fighting a delusion. For the moment, I roped them together, and, as Feisal fortunately liked changing men's minds rather than breaking railways, the preaching went the better.