Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 497 - The Real Lawrence of Arabia

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

** NOTE! THIS EPISODE WAS RECORDED BEFORE THE RECENT ATTACKS ON IRAN. (That's why I don't mention it) **  World War I turned allies into enemies and enemies into unlikely partners — and no one embodied that chaos more than Lawrence of Arabia. Was he a heroic bridge between cultures, or a brilliant pawn in Britain’s imperial game? This week’s Timesuck explores the daring raids, political deception, and lasting consequences of one man’s role in the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Have you ever heard the phrase, the enemy of my enemy is my friend? It's a pretty simple saying that holds true across a lot of eras of history, eras of warfare and conquest, of rulers vying for power of people trying to consolidate an empire, or to break one apart. But perhaps at no time was it more true than during World War I. After Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914, Germany was quick to come to the defense of its ally, Austro-Hungary. Serbia, meanwhile, called in their friend Russia,

who brought in both Britain and France and eventually the United States. And the big war would prove again that if your friends could make or break your success in battle, the same was true of your enemies. Across centuries of world of history leading up to the World War I, various groups had of course developed various grudges. For example, the Russian Jews who had fled to the Middle East in the wake of pogroms, understandably hated Russia, their former homeland, so much so that they were very willing to jump in on the side of the Ottoman Empire in Germany.

And even countries that were allies on the surface were enemies in the grand scheme of things. Britain and France, for example, both had different designs on claiming territory once the Ottoman Empire was carved up, meaning they were both allies and also competitors. They were basically frenemies. But perhaps nobody embodied the enemy of my enemy is my friend more than the hundreds of Arab families, tribes, and clans, living across the Arabian Peninsula, the land comprising modern-day Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, the UAE, Qatar, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. For centuries, they had been subjected to Ottoman rule, seen as second-class citizens, more or less,

good for paying taxes and running or working for various businesses, but not much else. With the onset of World War I, however, they represented a unique possibility. The Ottoman Empire wanted to ignite a pan-Islamic jihad, something that would galvanize the Arabs to fight on their side for the glory of Allah. But the allies, especially Britain, who had been watching from its nearby colonial base of Egypt, thought that maybe centuries of misrule had left, a pretty bad taste, and a lot of different tribes' mouths.

And maybe just maybe, the Arabs collectively, could be incentivized to throw off the yoke of Ottoman oppression and fight the Turks from the inside. The biggest obstacle to this plan was that the Arabs rightfully saw the British as just another colonizer, one who wasn't even Muslim, someone who would use the guise of helping to fold more territory into their empire. And they were aware that British opinion of Arabs in general was pretty low, pretty terrible, that they thought of the Arabs as primitive, politically unorganized and uncivilized.

Effective communication between the two cultures, much less working together, seemed impossible. But one man would change that perception. His name was Thomas Edward Lawrence, soon to become known around the world as Lawrence of Arrasse, A somewhat arrogant but also playful and certainly very passionate and incredibly intense archaeologist who had been born a bastard in 1888 to two parents carrying a shameful secret. As a young man, he had developed an interest in medieval warfare that had led him to work at a museum before he managed to get on an archaeological expedition in Syria. And then once he arrived in Syria, he quickly found out it was not the ruins he was most interested

in. He was interested in the people, the culture. He wanted to know their ways, their customs. What they liked, what they didn't. He wanted to know their fairy tales, their politics, everything in between. And by the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence found himself in a unique position, arguably more knowledgeable than any other Britain alive about Arabia, now a valuable asset. The British government understood Lawrence's importance, but they had no way of knowing that in a few short years, Lawrence would be doing way more than helping chart maps and translating he would be riding into battle amid a fearsome cadre of warriors,

himself dressed in traditional Arab robes, personally leading conquests of Arabian towns and fighting Turks. And now the British wondered, which side was Lawrence truly fighting for? A historical, geopolitical, multicultural, and biographical adventure awaits on this week's edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening. Well, happy Monday.

welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Cummins. There sucks a lot. Forby empathizer. Someone who is not named even one fucking time in the Epstein files. And you are listening to TimeSuck. Hail Nimrod. Hail Lucifina. Praise be to Good Boy Bojangles and Glory B to Triple M. A quick note about the Watts family murders episode that was, I believe, two weeks ago now, yeah.

Yes, I now know that one of the victim's names was pronounced Shanan or Shanan. Not Shannon, as I said. What is crazy is that I watched numerous videos of other people saying her name before arriving at Shannon. I thought Shannon was correct after I watched a video of her mom, who said to my ear, clearly, Shannon. I watched her say it that way in two separate videos, actually. When I started getting correction emails, I looked up more videos, and on a Dr. Phil video of all things, he clearly says Shanan, but her parents don't, they don't correct him, but then her mom goes on to say Shannon again to my ear. on Reddit threads. People claim that her mom and her dad consistently say Shannon to their ears. So I just wanted you to know that I do actually put a lot of work into pronunciations,

especially with victims' names. It is never meant to be disrespectful. But some names are truly tomato-tomato situations where fucking half people say it one way, half people say it another, and it's very hard to determine who is correct, especially when you're hearing the person's parents say it again in a way we're like, did she just say Shannon? I think she said Shannon. And that's it for what I have to say up top. How about some history now? If that's okay with you, if that's to your liking, which I strongly assume it is, since you heard what the topic is today,

and you're still here. So now for a topic that brings us back to the very crowded, very convoluted theater of World War I, something we covered all the way back in November of 2018 and episode 113. Today, however, we will not focus on the macro lens, the image you probably have of British and German forces, fighting in the trenches,

dealing with everything from trench foot to the horrors, of mustard gas, we'll be focusing instead on the Ottoman Empire, a vast expanse of lens, comprised of many different groups, all under Turkish rule. Let's get curious. Structure-wise today, we're going to spend by far most of our time with Lawrence in the timeline. Such a fascinating meat sack, so intensely curious. The style of this show might not have been for him, but I think he would have liked the spirit of at least a bunch of the episodes. operating in the theater of war crowded with different groups of people who all wanted different things who were willing to do just about anything to achieve their aims, including fuck over their allies,

Lawrence possessed the unique skill set to effectively cut through a lot of high-stakes bullshit. He saw through the colonial machinations of his own country, Britain, and of Britain's ally, France, and he came to sincerely believe in the Arab cause. The Arabs hadn't felt true independence since 15-16, when the Ottoman Empire had conquered the Arab provinces. World War I seemed ripe for asserting independence, a time of chaos, an opportunity, a time when the world, especially that part of the world,

was being remade. But would the Arab people get a chance to stake their claim on a new state? Or were the all-powerful imperialistic empires of Europe, eager to claim Ottoman territory for themselves to exploit its vast natural resources, beat them to the punch? And how does Lawrence,

a British person beholden to the crown, fit into all this? Understanding the Ottomans and the role they played in World War I is key to our episode today. So before the timeline, we'll begin with an overview of the beginning of World War I

before diving into the Ottoman Empire more specifically. Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe leading up to World War I, especially in the troubled Balkan region of Southeast Europe for years before World War I actually broke out. The spark that would light

such a huge fire would be, of course, the assassination of Archduke Friends Ferdinand of Austria by Serbian nationalist Gavrelo Prinzlip, who wanted to end, And Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina. This set off a chain reaction.

Austro-Hungria, Hungary, like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack, and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, quickly pledged that Germany would support the Austro-Hungarian cause. But Russia supported Serbia, and Russia was allies with France, who had close diplomatic ties to Great Britain. So, shit was complicated and potentially dangerous. On July 28th, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia

and the tenuous peace between Europe's great powers would quickly collapse. The war saw the entente or allied powers led by France, Russia, the British Empire, later also Italy and the U.S., go up against the central powers, led by Germany, Austro-Hungary, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.

Man, Hungary, I always want to say fucking Hungary. It is so annoying. I want to say, Austro-Hungary. You know how Hungry-O-Hastro is. But the Ottoman Empire was not really the best ally to have in this fight. They were a shadow of their former self. At one time, the astonishing Sunni Muslim state had been an astonishing power from its birthplace in a tiny corner of the mountainous region of Anatolia in modern-day Turkey.

The empire had steadily expanded until by the early 1600s, it encompassed an area rivaling that of the Roman Empire at its peak. It stretched from Vienna in the north to the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. from the shores of Western Mediterranean clear across to the port of Basra in modern-day Iraq. But by the second decade of the 20th century, the so-called Sick Man of Europe, as it was now known, had been spiraling into decline for many, many years. Like the Roman Empire before, the Ottoman Empire had struggled to maintain its bloated bureaucracy and decentralized political structure.

One attempt at reform that had weakened it was the Tonsomat, a series of reforms, made public between 1839 and 1876. These reforms were intended to make the empire into a modern, that is European state, but those attempts only made it easier for the centralized government to abuse its power. A lost war against Austro-Hungary, not Hungary, led to the Ottomans losing control of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Strategic District of Novi Pazar in Serbia and Cyprus, also in Ottoman property was put under British rule. and a lot of Ottomans didn't seem to mind being under someone else's control.

They were beyond frustrated with their own government due to the continual abuses of power they saw. They were upset that the Ottomans had adopted the Tanzamat, which they saw as two Western, and with the unconditional power of the Sultan. In 1876, Sultan Abdulaziz was deposed, and some leading Ottoman intellectuals attempted to set up a constitutional government with a two-chamber parliament in his absence, but then many of these intellectuals were exiled for this attempt. and others were put to death. Sultan Abdul Hamid, the second, succeeded Abdul-Haziz, who continued to attempt to modernize the Ottoman Empire,

but continued modernization of the army and administration and the formation of an elaborate spy system mostly just enabled the Sultan to monopolize power and crush opposition. He was not able to crush European opposition, however, because in 1882, under the pretext of defending the ruling clique from an independence-minded nationalist leader, Britain had invaded Egypt and effectively taken control of a country

that had been under a titular Ottoman rule for nearly 400 years. But the Sultan was great at using his power against his own people. He earned the ominous title of the Red Sultan for his brutal and bloody suppression of the Armenians between 1894 and 1896 and advocated for the idea of pan-Islamism, the idea that all Muslims should be ruled by a single state

that was ruled by He. him. Of course he did, right? The power hungry always want more power. It never ends. They want it all. That belief was used as justification for reclaiming lands where Muslims lived that either the Ottoman Empire had lost or never had to begin with, and the Sultan would end up expanding into Arabia. But his unpopularity increased, and in 1908, an uprising occurred, led by a group called the Young Turks, led by the three Pashas of Enver Pasha, D. Jamal Pasha, and Mehmed Pasha. Abdul Hamid was forced to restore the Constitution now, but then the army mutinied in April of 1909, and Abdul Hamid was deposed and replaced by Sultan Mehmed 5th, though the army became the real arbiters of Ottoman politics now,

while the young Turks attempted to push the country into industrializing and adopting more liberal attitudes towards things like a fucking crazy, radical leftist shit, like freedom of the press and women's rights. Fucking what? Freedom for women and the press? Fuck that. That's why rational people hate woke libtarts. Always want more evil shit like equality for historically marginalized groups and oppress with the freedom to speak truth to power and call out its own corruption and abuse without fear of arrest or being juveniles labeled fake news by want to be fascist. Crazy that the world has had to deal with their depraved, lunatic, secular, satanic, open-minded, equity-based bullshit for so long. No thanks. A quick side note. How many popular influencers do you think are out in the world right now that would say all the same shit I just had without sarcasm. Don't think about it too much.

It's depressing. Anyway, within the Ottoman Empire, an intense conservative backlash against the evil woman-loving progressives quickly plunged the new parliamentary government into an era of political infighting and paralysis. By 1911, the young Turks had begun to solidify their hold on power,

and had come up with three main rallying points in hopes of keeping their increasingly fractious empire together. Modernization, the defense of Islam, excuse me, and a call for a rejoining of the greater Turkic-speaking world or turinism. But the young Turks had to deal with too much opposition to make this a realistic goal. Modernization alienated conservative Muslims. The call for Turkish unity alienated the empire's

many other ethnic groups, Arabs, Slavs, Armenians, and Greeks, who now actually constituted a majority of the empire's population. So, more and more people start to hate the young Turks and their goals. And at the dawn of World War I, this opposition seemed like a big advantage for the allies. What if? By encouraging Arab independence, they wondered, they could get the Ottoman Empire's own people to rise up against them and topple them from within, or at least weaken them. But the Allies weren't all on the same page with this. Britain and France had their eyes on the oil-rich regions of Iraq and Syria and those people's independence. That didn't bode well for that.

Fucking oil. So much of world history since the Industrial Revolution has been a fight for access to oil reserves. Just like gold before it, so many cultures have been motherfucked by imperialist ambitions in this. regard and that shit's still going on right now in real time. No way America's fucking around with Venezuela if it wasn't. Did you know that Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the entire world? Estimated at approximately 300 billion to 303 billion barrels? Those reserves account for roughly 17 to 18 percent of the global total,

surpassing even those of Saudi Arabia. But were there primarily to fight narco-terrorism? Right. And Jeffrey Epstein was primarily focused on giving team. girls' good economic opportunities. It's always about money and power for the imperialists. So what did Britain and France do in regards to the Middle East heading into World War I? In short, they lied.

They promised the Arabs one thing, and they promised each other some other shit. They told the Arabs they wanted an uprising so they could have independence, but in reality, it was so they could carve them up and colonize them for themselves. They also worried that even if they could get the Arabs to rebel, who would make sure that the rebellion was going the way they wanted it to go? Who would be their person on the ground that the Arabs trusted? Well, that person would be T.E. Lawrence, a shy archaeologist who came out of his shell to become a fierce desert warrior. But there was one thing that the British had not considered.

Something so seemingly impossible, so ludicrous. The British didn't seem to consider it at all. What if Lawrence actually came to believe in the fight, the right for Arab independence? What if he didn't want to trick them? What if he became fucking woke? What if he realized that British and French imperialism was fucking evil and his ruthless exploitation of foreign people? What if Lawrence wasn't cool with helping institute an oppressive colonial system that valued white British people above all else and cared very little for the hopes and dreams and basic welfare of all the brown people that saw at the bottom?

What if he became a champion for a culture that couldn't have been further from the one he was born into? That possibility was unthinkable until it wasn't. Time for our timeline. Trap on those boots, soldier. We're marching. down a time-sunk timeline. T.E. Lawrence. Thomas, Edward Lawrence, was born on August 16th, 1888 to Mickey Mouse and your mom. Yeah, your mommy fucked Mickey, and Lawrence of Arabia is your fucking mutant half-brother.

His parents were Thomas Lawrence and Sarah Lawrence, of course. He was born in a house with name, Gorf Wischva, Welsh for Place of Rest, now known as Snowden Lodge in Tremadog in Northwest Wales. From the outside, everything about baby Ned's, and his family did call him Ned, life was, you know, normal. British, middle-class parents who held all the correct Victorian values of the day, priding restraint and sobriety. But Ned's middle-class, upstanding sober parents had a scandalous secret. They each had three dicks.

One couple, six cocks. No, that would be more of a medical curiosity than a scandal. No, they were essentially living his fugitive cell. A certain type of fugitive, anyway. Thomas Lawrence's real name was Thomas. Robert Tyg Chapman, and just a few years before, he had been a prominent member of the Anglo-Irish-Landed aristocracy. After being educated at Eton, the future baronet had returned to Ireland and the early night, in the early 18, oh my God, and in the early 1870s, that would fucking throw this story into a weird place. In the early 1870s, he took up the pleasant role of

a gentleman farmer of his family's estate in County Westmeath. He married a woman named Edith, from another wealthy Anglo-Irish family with whom he soon had four daughters. But then he began a torrid affair with the governess of his young daughters. A 24-year-old Scottish woman named Sarah Jenner. And by the time Chapman's wife learned of their torrid affair in early 1888,

Sarah already had one child with Thomas, an infant's son, secreted away in a rented apartment in Dublin, and a second kid on the way. Chapman's wife was very happy. No, no, she was furious. She was hurt and furious. So furious.

She refused to divorce him, and now the aristocrat was forced to choose between his two families. If he opted to stay with his mistress, with the governor of Sarah Jenner, Thomas Chapman would not only be stripped of most of his family's inheritance, but his four daughters would have great difficulty

in ever marrying due to the taint of this kind of family scandal at the time. Man, the prim and proper crowd can just get fucked, always in forever. They've always sucked. Imagine being such an uppity cunt that you won't allow your son to marry a woman because her dad had an affair and got a divorce.

Imagine carrying that much about status and unwritten and frankly pretty sad and stupid social rules. What a silly goose way to live? As illegitimate, as dirty, godless bastards. His two sons by Sarah Junner would be barred from many of the better schools and higher professions. You can't work here! Your parents weren't married.

You're a filthy cretan. The most judicious thing to do was probably to ship Sarah back to our native Scotland, give her enough money to take care of the boys alone until they grew up. But Thomas Chapman would not do that. He stayed with Sarah. This was not just some affair

based on lust alone. He actually loved the governess. He had been pressured to marry his wife thanks to her title and family fortune. He chose the governess because it seems he actually legitimately cared about her. Renouncing his claim to the family fortune, Thomas left Ireland with Sarah in mid-1888

for the anonymity of a small village in Northern Wales called Tramadog. Almost unheard of for those times doing that. Part of me loves it, but also I do feel terrible for the daughters he left behind, of course, and his wife, who had also been pressure to marry him. The couple's children, as well as the couple themselves, all took Sarah's mother's maiden name Lawrence. And in August of 1888, Thomas Edward Lawrence was born. They would call him,

as we said, Ned. But the couple was still scared that they would be found out because Edith refused to divorce him. He was not able to wed Sarah, hence the taking of her mother's name. With their modest annuity from the Chapman family estate, they moved to a remote village in northern Scotland, then to the Isle of Man, then to a small French town, then to a secluded hunting lodge on the southern English coast. In each place the Lawrence's rented homes on the outskirts of the village or surrounded, you know, homes surrounded by high stone walls, they didn't keep up with friends, they rarely left the house,

they were fucking social pariahs. You can imagine how your mother and I have suffered all these years Thomas Lawrence would write in a posthumous letter to his sons. Not knowing what day we might be recognized by someone and our sad history published far and wide. By the time they had four sons and a fifth on the way, the fugitive life was not working anymore. If their sons would have any opportunities in life,

they would have to live in a cosmopolitan town with a good aristocratic school. So in 1896, they moved to Oxford to a house at Polstead Road. And Ned, now eight years old and living in his sixth home, is starting to figure out his parents' shameful secret. But he doesn't tell his brothers or confront his parents. He just keeps it to himself. That was his way. Saying less came naturally to Ned, so did suffering and silence.

At the Oxford High School for Boys, he later attended, Lawrence was known as an exceptionally bright but intensely quiet student. He didn't only have a bookish side, though. He also had a side that loved bicycle riding and practical jokes. That second side also loved to test limits. He loved to see how fast he could go on his bike or how long he could go without food or water. This tendency was so present that Henry Hall, his teacher in the fourth form, equivalent to American 8th grade, took notice and later wrote in remembrance of Lawrence, he was unlike the boys of his time,

for even in his school days, he had a strong leaning toward the stoics, an apparent indifference towards pleasure or pain. Some of this might have come from his parents. As the boys got older, Sarah became more religious and more prone to physical punishments, protracted whippings with belts and switches.

Ned was her most frequent physical target, and Ned made a point of never asking for mercy or begging for forgiveness. which for whatever reason only made her beatings worse. There was something else that made Ned stand out too, his size. Around the age of 15, he just abruptly stopped growing. His brothers would all grow taller than him as he stayed between 5-2 and 5-3, which also seemed to deepen his shyness.

His small stature combined with a head too big for his size, according to one source, would be a source of insecurity. And I've looking at pictures, they're correct. His head pretty big for his size. It would be a source of insecurity for him for the rest of his life and also an advantage. Gave him quite the Napoleon complex that arguably pushed him

to be a lot more adventurous and ambitious than he would have been had he grown six or so inches taller. Pretty funny how little details like that can shape people's lives. So, book is shy, small, craving feats of physical endurance and unwilling to submit as a point of honor.

What do you think young Ned turns to? An obsession with medieval knights. He began taking long bicycle trips to churches in the English countryside where he would conduct brass rubbings of memorial plaques. kind of like the thing where you put a sheet of paper over something and rub a crayon over it to get the image transposed, but with different materials. With his best friend at the time, Cyril Beeson, he scoured the construction sites of new buildings going up in Oxford and search old relics and came upon a good number of them, actually.

These finds, mostly glass and pottery shards from the 16th and 17th centuries, soon led Ned to the Ashmeline Museum in Central Oxford. Oldest public museum in the world, having first opened and seen. This museum was a treasure trove with an emphasis on charting the confluence between eastern and western cultures. It poured a lot of gasoline on an already pretty intense fire of curiosity, burning inside young Lawrence. The curators there encouraged the young boys' fascinations, and he soon became a helping hand of the museum, an unofficial volunteer, frequently dropping by after school and helping with odd jobs on the weekends. The Ashmaline's annual report for 1906 said that two teenage boys, by incessant wife, Watchfulness secured everything of antiquarian value which had been found.

Soon after this, he decided to embark on his most daring trip yet. In the summer of 1906, the summer he turned 18, Lawrence on recess from Oxford High School for boys, spent months bicycling through northwestern France alone, especially adventurous in the days before GPS, MapQuest, or cell phones. His mission was both simple and insane, a nearly thousand-mile trek that took him to almost every notable castle and cathedral in the region of Normandy to study these cathedrals and castles. I returned home, finished his last year of high school, then began attending Jesus College of Oxford University in 1907, where he would specialize in history. He planned to write his thesis on the architecture of medieval castles and fortifications, and in the summer of 1908, he planned an elaborate 2,400-mile bicycle trek that would take him to nearly every significant structure across France.

Sane in cheap accommodations, or just camping in the rough, he routinely peddled more than 100 miles a day as he went from one ancient castle or battlement to the next. At each, he took photographs, made sketches, rode up exhaustive notes before getting back on that bike and pedaling on. The more he saw, the more curious he got, more he wanted to see, more he wanted to learn about other things. He was realizing that there was more to his interest than European architecture as well. on August 2nd, 1908, when Lawrence reached the walled medieval village of Egmorta, he saw the Mediterranean Sea for the very first time, and he felt an intense sense of wonder that he had never felt before. In a letter home, he wrote, I bathe today in the sea, the great sea, the greatest in the world. You can imagine my feelings. I felt that at last I had reached the way to the south and all the glorious east, Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyres, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete. They were all there, all within reach of me.

Oh, I must get down here, farther out again. Really, this getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance. I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow. Well, hail Nimrod. Loving here, you know, hearing about somebody's curiosity getting spark like that. When I studied abroad for a semester in London, roughly a thousand years ago, I backpacked myself across France during my 10-day semester break, sleeping at night on the train, and I had a similar experience in Nice.

It was the first time I had seen them at a training. I had a sketchbook with me. I was making these little drawings of places I thought were cool so I could remember them. Spending a few hours on the beach alone, it just felt fucking magical. I still think about that afternoon sometimes. I was 20 years old, filled with so much wonder

for so many places I'd never seen and people I'd never met, just really a beautiful day. Can't wait to do more traveling soon now that my youngest Monroe is just months away from being done with high school, and Lindsay and I will be empty nesters and free to travel more easily. I feel like the more you can travel

if you are lucky enough to be able to, the more you can see other people, the more you can see other cultures, the more you realize that we're all so much more similar than we are different and your empathy and tolerance it just grows and grows.

At least for most people, some motherfuckers are just too stubborn and too cowardly to ever get out of their own way and be saved, though. When Lawrence returned to Oxford, that autumn, he wanted to redo his thesis entirely. Put simply, he found there wasn't much to be said

about examining European medieval fortifications and isolation that hadn't already been said a bunch of times before. But there was an enduring mystery in the study of military architecture, which innovations in medieval battlements were of Western or Eastern origin. That hadn't been done a million times before. He had the Christian Crusaders learn from their Muslim enemies while invading the Holy Land or had the Muslims copied from the Crusaders.

Was it a big mixture of both? If that was true, what came from whom? So Lawrence began to plan a new journey. And for this one, he hoped to get help from David Hogarth, the director of the Ashmaline Museum. He explained to Hogarth that he wanted to take a comprehensive survey of the Crusader castles of the Syrian near east, not just some of them or the most important of them, but all of them.

He told David that if he couldn't help him, he was going to do his damnedest to head their next summer alone. And Hogarth promptly slapped him in the face and said, are you fucking crazy? You? With that big ass bobblehead? On that tiny, feeble body, you'll be killed before you ever make it. You're too small in two weeks. if anyone, literally anyone, punches you in the face just one time,

that little toothpick neck of yours is going to snap off, a little fella. Hogarth didn't say or do that. I don't think. Maybe. I don't know. Hogarth was, to put it mildly, uh, fucking confused, though. Lawrence looked about 15 years old, even though he was 20. And he was talking about a journey of over a thousand miles through deserts and rugged mountain ranges with roads that were severely deteriorated in many places if they existed at all. And summer was the worst time to do this. Temperatures regularly reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some of the locations he was determined to make it to. Lawrence would not hear any objection, so.

He was going to walk across Syria alone on his tiny little baby feet when he wasn't riding his bike if he had to, and that was that. And now, before we move forward and discuss his travels, time for today's first to two, mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space editor on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad free, get episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listening to our sponsors. Hope you heard some deals that made sense for you. And now let's return to September of 1909.

Anyone who happened to be crossing this serenely hot plain west of Aleppo in northern Syria and early September of 1909 might have encountered a perplexing sight. A young, painfully thin Englishman. A rucksack slung over his shoulders, tromping along while close on his heels trailed a squadron of Turkish cavalry. Cavalry, excuse me. He had arrived in the remote foothills town of Syracian. a few days before, and was immediately, mistakenly, treated as a visiting dignitary, so he stayed in the governor's home, was given a personal bodyguard of cavalrymen. It is rather amusing to contemplate a pedestrian guarded carefully by a troop of light horse, he wrote his family in describing the incident. Of course, everybody thinks I am mad to walk, and the escort offered me a mount on the average

of once a half hour. They couldn't understand my prejudice against anything with four legs. Lawrence would actually make two journeys that summer, first at the coastal city of Beirut, then an elaborate and punishing trek north. That second adventure would change his life. Everywhere he went, he was greeted with astonishment and generosity, with offers to stay in people's homes, to eat food with locals. Nobody ever accepted payment. Lawrence was fucking blown away.

He'd been raised, like most of us, on some level, to fear different cultures, to assign all kinds of negative stereotypes to them. But reality was, as it so often is, much different. once back in Oxford his senior year Lawrence toiled on his thesis in a pleasant little cottage his father had built for him in the garden of Polstead Road home you know thinking about all his adventures and also that's fucking adorable that his dad made a little cottage for him why does it make me picture Frodo Baggins little home in the shire

then in Lawrence's version of Baggins his thoughts wandered frequently to the places he had been the people he had met during his summer travels the thesis he compiled was eventually titled a cute little fellas big-headed guy to the galaxy. No, that was patronizing. No, it was titled, The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture to the end

of the 12th century. Because it was full of original research, he was awarded first-class honors and received one of only 10 awards given to the History School that year. He seemed to now have an academic career made in the shade. Started on his postgraduate work immediately in France

on medieval lead glaze pottery created between the 11th and 16th centuries. He hoped that eventually, after he became a professor, he would make enough money or secure enough funding to go on his own expeditions and head back to Syria. And he would get that much sooner than he thought. In the autumn of 1910, he learned that his acquaintance, David Hogarth was about to leave for northern Syria to oversee an archaeological dig for the British Museum. Lawrence was able to convince his museum friend to take him along. He was, to put it mildly, fucking pumped.

Lawrence first reached the site at Karkamish, an important ancient capital, in the northern part of the region of Syria. In February of 1911 as a junior assistant, but since he was one of only two Westerners sent to oversee a force of some 200 local workmen, he soon became something more like a construction foreman. And to his great surprise, he liked it. He was a natural leader.

To be fair, he was European, and that alone gave him a lot of leadership clout with the locals because Europeans, through some concessions that had been forced to make previously were exempt from Ottoman law. But Lawrence also had something, very few other Europeans did, that earned him a lot of respect from the locals,

several slaves and a deep hatred of homosexuals and women, JK. But appointed, J.K., Ottoman's man, far worse than Western culture when it comes to basic human rights. But anyway, Lawrence did have a true appreciation and respect for Syrian culture and not the, you know, bad anti-humanist parts.

He learned to not only speak Arabic by going home with his men after work and taking notes and everything from their politics to their recipes to their fairy tales. he also became fluent in their actual culture. And so he got respect by giving respect. Imagine that. Those workmen had probably literally never met a single white foreigner

who had learned the names of their children and relatives and ancestors before, who gladly accepted invitations and showed genuine respect for their traditions. He also impressed them by working hours into blazing heat, never complaining even through bouts of dysentery and malaria. For Lawrence's part, he also started to think critically about what he had been taught regarding who he supposedly was and what he supposedly represented. Soon he was not so sure that he was supposed to bring civilization to these people, as the British Empire said he would.

It seemed a whole lot more like they were bringing civilization to him, or at the very least that they were all sharing it. At the same time, however, he realized that the Ottoman Empire, for all the reasons we mentioned above, was coming to part of the seams. And as Lawrence continued his work at the site, things got worse for the empire. In 1911, the Italians invaded Libya. Mazarati, baga spaghetti, I would take us some Africa.

Setting off a bloody war, but eventually led to an Ottoman defeat. Overlapping that conflict came the first Balkan war in which the Ottomans lost most of their remaining European possessions, immediately followed by the second Balkan war. With that small-scale rebellions and separatist movements sprung up across what remained of the empire, and even local chieftains and clan leaders, sensing that their moment to declare their independence was here, the local Kurdish tribes who lived in the area of Syria

where Lawrence's archaeological site was located, threatened an insurrection in 1912, which Lawrence found to be fantastic. Less fantastic for him was the fact that European powers seemed to be sensing the decline and had come for a feeding frenzy. Lawrence wasn't sure what would or should be done about that. Then that September, Lawrence's little brother Will came to visit.

He was the middle Lawrence child. Two years, Ned's Jr., will reported to their parents as if to reassure them, that Ned had not gone too wayward or become too bohemian. Quote, You must not think of Ned as leading an uncivilized existence. When I saw him last as a train left the station, he was wearing white flannel, socks, and red slippers,

with a white magdalene blazer, and was talking to the governor of, uh, be rojik, be rojik in lordly fashion. But parts of his life would undoubtedly have scared his parents, like the fact that Lawrence was given a young leopard by the government official in Aleppo and it became the site's watchdog

which sounds terrifying I mean wild animals right they can be so cute until they remind you what their true nature is that autumn the site also revealed its most important discovery dinosaur bones yeah we want to see them

dinosaur bones yeah where can we see them uh no they didn't find dinosaur bones Dinoceros bones that I'm aware of. I just really wanted to play that again. They did find the main temple. Fuck yeah.

Some Indiana Jones type shit. It was a discovery of a lifetime and Lawrence planned on staying at the site for five or six more years before leaving to find the next big Indiana Jones adventure and or discovery. But that year funding from the British Museum ran out. And unless his crew got new funding,

the next digging season the spring of 1914 would be their last. So what the hell is Lawrence going to do now? The idea of going back to comparatively stuffy, uninteresting British society felt like a death sentence for him. They had two months of off-season before the digging began, presumably to return

home to England, but a few weeks after the announcement, however, the British Museum director sent a letter saying that a group of royal engineers was about to embark on an archaeological survey of the so-called wilderness of Zinn down in the southernmost Palestine, a significant biblical region, a boundary for the

promised land and old stomping ground of Moses. Mike Lawrence and Leonard Woolley, the other Britain at the site, be interested in joining them during their upcoming break. Both men were like, hell yeah. They had no idea, at least at the moment, that they were being used as a cover. Stuart Newcomb, a legendary figure in the Near East, who already surveyed and had already surveyed and mapped vast tracks of Egypt and Sudan for the British government, had been sent by the British government to lead five military mapping teams.

When he arrived to pick the archaeologists up in early January 1914, he explained to Lawrence, who had sort of come to suspect some of these details, that since Britain had taken possession of the Suez Canal in 1882, it had basically destroyed his relationship with the Ottoman Empire. They then captured the Sinai Peninsula in 1906, which meant they now had the undying resentment of the Ottoman Empire. That didn't seem like a big deal back then, but with Europe now coming closer and closer to the brink of war, the British were getting nervous. If war broke out, it seemed likely that the Ottomans would do everything in their power to recapture the Suez Canal. and then possibly spark an anti-British insurrection in Egypt.

And that would cost a lot of people and the British government a lot of money. Ottoman British fighting seemed all but assured, and because of that impending reality, the British were determined to have the upper hand when it started. And to that end, they wanted to map the area around Sinai, essentially the triangle-shaped lower half of present-day Israel, called Zinn, for future military maneuvers. They had gotten permission from Constantinople to conduct an archaeological survey,

given how the region was mentioned multiple times, for example, in the book of Exodus. The archaeologists would get to operate mostly independently, and Lawrence would spend the winter moving over the bleak terrain at a relentless pace, pushing himself and his team to their limits.

Meanwhile, by early February of 1914, the military teams had surveyed much of the border region's interior, and while they had found a few trails, they had uncovered nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size, except perhaps in the area of the Gulf of Akaba.

In the town of the same name, a hundred mile long inlet ending in a fishing village with roads into the vast Arabian interior. Captain Newcomb wanted to know more about this area, and to accompany him, he needed somebody who would be polite, but stubborn, somebody like Lawrence.

They arrived in mid-February, and Lawrence immediately began to photograph whatever he could. At one point, he got arrested for going out of bounds, and he led his captors on a wild goose chase that ended with him coming across two huge crossroads perfect for military purposes. Lawrence made it back to his site in early March and got some great news.

A British philanthropist, a philanthropist had funded more explorations in the area for at least two more years. With that cheerful news, Lawrence planned to quickly finish the Wilderness of Zinn Report for the Palestine Exploration Fund during his upcoming break in England, then hurry back to Karkamish for, you know, the next digging season. But just as the season's dig was closing down. down in June, he got a letter from Stuart Newcomb. Newcomb had been spying on the progress

that the Germans were making on the Baghdad Railway, and in particular, on their tunneling projects in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains, could Lawrence and Woolley take the same route back to England to see if they could spot anything? Once again, both of them agree.

What an adventurous young life Lawrence is living, right? They would now have two spy missions under their belts and they are eager for more. And then a new development would give that to them. On June 28, 1914, Archduke, Friends Ferdinand, is assassinated in the streets of Sarajevo. Newspapers reported it eagerly, and many Britons were ready for war. Interestingly, Lawrence made no mention of it, though, in his letters or diary entries.

As somebody who had seen imperial tensions boil over into little skirmishes over and over again, he had no reason to think that this crisis would be any different, right, that it would turn into anything bigger. Lawrence thought he'd be back on his dig site in just a few weeks. But unbeknownst to him, his days as an archaeologist, are almost over. A week later on August 4th, 1914, Britain declares war on Germany. Within days of the war's declaration, Frank Lawrence, the second youngest and most military-minded of the five Lawrence boys, is given his commission as a second lieutenant in the third Gloucester Battalion. Meanwhile, in India, Ned's younger

brother, Will Lawrence, swiftly made plans to return to England in order to enlist, while Bob, the eldest brother, three years Ned Sr., signed on with the Royal Army Medical Corps. By the month's end, that left just 14-year-old Arnold and 26-year-old Ned at home. Ned had no way of imagining when he would be able to get back to his site, if at all. The Ottoman Empire was predicted to join in

on the side of the central powers, making it Britain's enemy, but that also meant that the mapping expedition he had just been on, as Stuart Newcomb had predicted, was now extremely important. So Lawrence feverishly finished the Wilderness of Zinn report,

and in September he and Willie contacted Newcomb to ask him if he would help them get positions in the military's administration so they could go back. Newcomb told him to hold off. He wanted them free if they were needed for an altogether different kind of military job, military intelligence.

Lawrence was uneasy about that, sounded dangerous as fuck. Things were going a little too well for Germany. On the Western Front, their armies had swept through neutral Belgium, then turned south, scattering the disorganized French and British forces before them. They now stood at the banks of the Marne River, just 30 short miles from Paris. On the eastern front, they had annihilated one Russian

invasion force and were about to destroy another. Fucking Germans, right? No one caused more problems in the 20th century for the Western world, or just the world in general than the Germans. But then in the second week of September, the British and French checked the German advance, began to push them back, right? It was good. Not the quick overall victory that Britain had expected when they entered the war, though.

Instead, by six weeks in, as many as half a million were dead. Meanwhile, Lawrence submitted his wildernesses-in report and was dispatched in mid-October to take up a new position as a civilian catographer. at the general staff's geographical section in central London, and he hated it. He hated how much people bowed unquestionably to authority, the rigid hierarchical structure, the special privileges that people got, seemingly just for being born to the right families. And since most of the cartographers had been dispatched to France, Lawrence was working with second-rate mappers or ones who have been brought out of retirement.

Lawrence was also pissed that he fell far below the minimum height standard of the British Army, which was 4 foot nothing. I mentioned his height, right? He stood around 3 foot 10. He actually wrote a song about this rejection that will not be recorded for many, many years after his death, but when it is, finally recorded

it will become quite popular. Hello? I wish I was a little bit taller. I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call it. Wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat 6'4 and 4.

I wish I was like 6'9. Did you think that Skilo wrote that? No, no, he wrapped it. But that was Lawrence of Avery with lyrics, I think. It's a hunch that I haven't fact-checked, and I never will. So maybe he didn't write a song, but he was sad. Lawrence knew that the only place he would be of real use would be in the Ottoman Empire, which still had not entered the war. But soon that would no longer be the case.

On September 9th, Constantinople had announced a general mobilization of its armed forces, though it still had not entered the war. That would change on November 2nd when the Ottoman Empire came into the war on the side of Germany and Austro-Hungary, not Austro-Hungary. This meant Stuart Newcomb was recalled from the French theater and moved to Cairo, the city slated as headquarters for Britain's war effort in the Near East. Newcomb immediately tapped Lawrence to go with him, and he was back doing some exciting Indiana Jones type shit again.

The French steamer, not the Cleveland steamer, to be clear, a French one, very different type of ride, that carried Lawrence and Newcomb to Egypt would arrive on December 15th, 1914. Cairo was in a city of less than a million people, but a place of wide boulevard, beautiful parks, and elegant promenades. It was also now a transit point for hundreds of thousands of troops from India, Australia, and New Zealand, passing through the Suez Canal on their way to the Western Front. The British had quickly taken over many of the city's finer hotels to house their officers, including the Savoy, where Lawrence was now headed.

Newcomb would be his boss, as I mentioned, and he was joined by his old archaeology friend, Rudolph Woolley, as well as two young aristocrats, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert, both city members of parliament at the time. Lawrence was put in charge of the unit's mapping room, essential work as the British braced for an attack on the Suez Canal. By January of 1915, Lawrence and the rest of the British officers were waiting impatiently for the seemingly inevitable attack on the canal now. Impatiently because it seemed like any way you cut it, Britain would win. To reach the canal, the Turks first had to cross 120 miles of inhospitable Sinai Peninsula. meaning there would probably just be a small force. The Brits hoped the expected battle would be a one-sided slaughter.

They wanted to get it over with so they could focus on the next chapter of the Near East War when the British could go on the offensive. Figuring out how to do that offensive was going to be complicated, despite its enormous size and tenuous political cohesion in the Ottoman Empire, still astonishingly well protected. The most alluring option was to hit Constantinople and cut off the head, so to speak, of the Ottoman Empire, its most important political and symbolic city.

except that was almost impossible because Greece and Bulgaria were still neutral so an approach from the West wouldn't work an eastern advance by the Russians might be possible but they were already being walloped by the Germans on the eastern front

and the southern approach would see fierce local resistance so there was simply no easy way to do it except maybe by approaching by water through the Gulf of Alexandreda a natural deep harbor in the eastern Mediterranean with flat land along its shores that ground troops could use to push inland.

There was also also another possible advantage to taking this route, and that was the local people's anger. Most people in the Ottoman Empire wanted nothing to do with the war that was being fought by their imperial overlords and had already taken much of their personal property away from them, and nowhere was this more the case than in Alexandria. Alexandria was the demarcation zone between the Turkish world to the north and the Arab world to the south, and also at the edge of the heartland of the Armenians. Between the Armenians and the Arabs, there was the possibility that the British would inspire enough local resentment

towards the Turks to start an uprising. If they could pull that off, maybe just maybe, they could split the empire in two. But first, they had to keep control of the Suez Canal. On February 3rd, 1914, it was finally go time. Turkish engineers hastily assembled their ten pontoon bridges at the water's edge as foot soldiers massed behind them, ready to charge across. Fortunately for the Allies, a British searchlight picked up the activity before many of the troops had crossed. And in a barrage of rifle and artillery fire, seven of the Pondu bridges were quickly destroyed. The approximately 600 Turkish soldiers, who had managed to reach the far shore before their escape routes were cut off, were all either quickly killed or compelled to surrender.

No Egyptians came to rescue them, and what was worse, many of the Arab units in the Ottoman forces fled as soon as the shooting began. Some even ran to join their enemy. By night, remaining Turkish forces considered the situation hopeless, and then they fled. Lawrence and his fellow British officers are pumped. Now if they could just push forward with the landing at Alexandria, it seemed like the Ottoman Empire might be knocked out of the war within just a few months of entering it, but unbeknownst to them,

some war strategists in London had a different plan. They wanted to focus on the Dardanelles, the Dardanelles straight below Constantinople, a narrow waterway twisting some 30 miles long between mountains before it opens up to the inland sea of Marmara. Winston Churchill, first lord of the, The Admiralty at this point was a big fan of this plan. It set the path for decapitating Turkey by taking Constantinople.

And with the Royal Navy focused on that, there would not be enough manpower left for Alexandreda, or so the war strategist said even though Lawrence predicted it would just take two or three thousand soldiers. Unbeknownst to Lawrence, the real reason Britain did not want to strike at Alexandria was because France already laid claim to Syria as a post-war price. These fuckers were carving up the spoils before the war was won. They wanted to be at the head of any Syrian invasion. When he figured out what was going on, Lawrence was disgusted.

In a letter to his parents, he bitterly noted, so far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy. So now we move on to that Dardanelles plan, a plan that was not as good, but they were going to do it anyway, sacrificed a lot of people's lives, just so France could, you know, get what it wanted in Syria. On February 19th, 1915, a joint British and French flotilla appeared on the southern entrance to the strait, and their long-range guns proceeded to, and their long-range guns proceeded to shell the Turkish fortresses at will.

Most of those forts were soon reduced to rubble, and the British assumed that by continuing along this way, they would reach Constantinople in two easy weeks. On March 18th, after a brief lull, the Allied fleet returned to the mouth of the Dardanelles again, but this time things didn't go as planned. For the first three hours, the Allied Armada pounded away at the coastal forts with much of the same ease as they had back in February. But then shit went sideways. The trouble started when the first line of ships were commanded to fall back to make room for the second. During the February bombardment, the Turks had taken note of an odd habit of the Allied fleet that when reversing course, they almost invariably turned their ships to starboard.

On the chance that would continue, they recently had laid a string of mines in an inlet that the Allies, would traverse on a starboard turn. And sure enough, at about 2 p.m., the retiring Allied first line steered directly into that minefield, in rapid succession, three warships sunk, and three more were heavily damaged. Instead of abandoning the mission now,

the British doubled down, adding a ground defensive. Lawrence, meanwhile, was probably feeling pretty shitty about right now, but that would change when he met Ronald Storrs, the British Oriental Secretary to Egypt. With his pencil-thin mustache and fondness for white linen suits, Stores cut a dandyish figure Among the predominantly uniformed British population of wartime Cairo

Dude looked like a real-life clue character Also of classic literature And he and Lawrence spent hours discussing Homer and Dante Sipping gin martinis, perhaps Unbeknownst to Lawrence, when the pair first met Stores was actually on another secret mission The reason for the mission had begun a year earlier in February of 1914 When Abdullah Ibn Hussein,

the 32-year-old second son of Amir Hussein bin Ali Ha al-Hashimi of Mecca, the steward of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, came calling in Cairo. While the Amir's disenchantment with the Constant noble regime was becoming fairly common knowledge by this point, Abdullah pushed matters into a whole new realm. He granted a brief meeting with Herbert Kitchener, British Secretary of State of War, and Stor his mentor,

and he attempted to get a feel for what the Consul General thought the British reaction would be to an outright Arab revolt in the Hajas, western region of present-day Saudi Arabia. Kichner sidestepped the question, since the British and the Ottoman Empire was still at peace at that point. Now it seemed like the British had a unique opportunity, though. When Kichner asked Hussein,

if now that things had changed, the offer still stood, Hussein hinted that he might be able to lead his followers into revolt. Seizing on that prospect, Kichner swiftly sent another message that dramatically up the ante. should the Arabs join with Britain rather than merely stay neutral, Kichner wrote, Great Britain will guarantee the independence, rights, and privileges of the Sharifate, against all external foreign aggression, in particular that of the Ottomans.

Till now we have defended and befriended Islam in the person of the Turks. Hence forward, it shall be in that of the noble Arab. But then Hussein waffled a bit in his response, and communication between the two sides broke down. telling Lawrence about all this, Stores added that he had spent most of his time in Cairo thus far trying to determine if there was still a possibility of an Arab revolt in Syria. Lawrence, when informed of all this, thought the plan sounded potentially very, very good. An alliance with Hussein could negate the potential accusations that Britain was trying to incite rebellion to take over the Middle East.

A revolt starting with the ultra-religious Hussein family also had the added benefit of carrying an overtone of religious obligation to join it. something that might get a lot of Arabs past their dislike and distrust of the British. But without any further communication from Hussein, it was hard to tell how it might go. Indeed, Hussein had recently sent his third son, Faisal, to meet with Ottoman forces in Syria and proceed to more meetings with the young Turk leadership in Constantinople. They wouldn't know for nearly a year that Faisal had not been trying to reconcile with the Turks, but had been trying to figure out if any notable families in Constantinople might be willing to switch sides. all the while reassuring the young Turks

that he and his family were still loyal. A lot of different factions, feeling out a lot of different possibilities early in this war, right? It's really a collection of a bunch of wars. Lawrence was curious as to the Hussein family's true intentions, but then his attention was drawn back to the Dardanelles campaign. During the first weeks of April,

a vast flotilla of ships began to assemble along the northern coast of Egypt now, while in the 10th cities that dotted the shoreline, tens of thousands of soldiers were kept busy hauling supplies and practicing combat drills. They were members of the newly formed Mediterranean expeditionary force, soon to strike on behalf of the British and French

at the head of the Turkish army. But Lawrence observed that the Med-X forces seemed shockingly unprepared. Unthinkable to Lawrence, they had only had an obsolete, were just using an obsolete and vague map of the region for their strategies. Right, right, for all their planning.

For their landing point, the British had chosen a Gallipoli southern tip, it was a terrible choice. The force there would be vulnerable to defenders who had dug in on the heights above them, completely exposed to long-range artillery fire. Why did they choose it? Because since the operation has started as a naval one, the success or failure of it was judged through whether or not they cleared the straits.

Not any of the other objectives. They could have accomplished by trying a different approach. Despite Lawrence's concerns, Medex went ashore April 25, 1915. They came on unarmored, wooden boats sent from, warships, and just as they began to come ashore, just as Lawrence had feared, the Turkish machine gunners opened fire, and medic soldiers never had a chance. Any who made it to the beaches were quickly cut down by machine guns. Anyone still in the warships who tried to fire back were immediately shot down as well, and many others died from being pinned beneath the dead or wounded and suffocated.

It was a terrible slaughter. German forces working with the Turks were so bewildered by this that commanders maintained for several days that it must have been a faint, that the real offensive must be coming from somewhere else, right? That couldn't have been the real offensive. The Britain's first mission was to have reached a village some four miles inland, initially predicted to happen that day, but instead they would never reach that village, not over the course of an operation that would extend to a mind-boggling seven months. Meanwhile, Faisal, that son of Hussein seniors, who had come from Mecca to see about any possible uprising as the young Turks and Constantinople, he'd made his way back to Mecca. He had an important

important document with him. From his meeting with the young Arab society, a nationalist organization working in secret in Constantinople, they had worked to draw up a document called the Damascus protocol, a list of conditions whereby, with British assistance, they might still be able to launch this revolt. As Faisal set out for his return to Mecca, the sole copy of the protocol was hidden in the boot of his most trusted bodyguard. Pretty fucking dope hiding spot. Meanwhile, Lawrence was busy editing a compendium of reports to be sent to the British military command. Having a bunch of work to do kept him from falling further

into the throes of despair and disgust, furious that Britain had thrown away such a good chance of winning the war quickly out of deference to France, that Medex had chosen such a stupid landing point, that a lot of fellow Britons had been needlessly killed over some political bullshit.

And more bad news was coming, this time personal bad news. On May 9th, T.E. Lawrence had his height measured again into his great dismay. He had to face the fact that he was shrinking. He now stood standing straight as an arrow at three foot six, but his large head, curiously, still the same size at 18 inches tall. Nearly half of his height is now head. And that wasn't the only bad personal

news he received. I'll share the real, not made up bad news he received right after today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors, hope you heard some deals you like. Now, what bad news did Lawrence of Arabia actually receive? May 9th of 1950. His younger brother, 22-year-old Frank stationed in the ARA's sector of the Western Front was doing repair work on a forward trench in preparation for an assault when he was struck by three shrapnel fragments from a German artillery shell. Frank's commanding officer reported in his condolence letter to Lauren's family that their son had died instantly.

The news shattered Sarah, Frank had been her favorite. Ned learned of his little brother's death in mid-May. He wasn't able to return home for the funeral, right, a little bit harder to travel back then. by the midsummer of 1915 Britain still had not given up on the idea of landing at Gallipoli so many men were dying

that informal truces began to be called just to take time to gather up the dead and then fighting would restart and then something weird happened on August 29th an Ottoman lieutenant climbed up from his army's trench started across the no man's land between the two armies carrying a white flag

he announced that he intended to surrender his name was Muhammad al-Faruki and the 24-year-old had a strange story to tell. He told British intelligence that he was a member of a secret military society called the Awakening. Pretty cool name. Comprised largely of Arab officers like himself that have been waiting in vain for months for the right conditions to stage a revolt against their Turkish overlords. Al-Faruki was shipped to Cairo after this confession, but nobody knew what to make of him if what he was saying was actually true or just a ruse until he suggested that British had squandered a profound military. opportunity by not going ashore at Alexandreda in the spring of 1915.

Lawrence was like, I fucking told you so. He said that not only had Alexandria been guarded by Arabs who might defect, but many of them were members of the Awakening, and that they had even sabotaged the city's defensive fortifications hoping in anticipation of an imminent British landing force. And there was more. For a long time, he said he had been the liaison between the awakening and another Arab secret society. Al-Fatat. From this, he had learned about secret negotiations between Al-Fatat and

Amir Hussein in Mecca to stage a joint uprising against the Turks. In the process, Al-Aad had also learned of the secret correspondence between Amir Hussein and the British in Cairo. He said that if armed and supported by Britain, both Arab secret societies, the civilian, Al-Fat, the military, Al-Aud, would now be prepared to join Amir Hussein in revolt against the Turks. But this deal came with the price. Right, the British would have to recognize an independent Arab nation that would encompass Iraq, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula. And the French were not to have a controlling presence fucking anywhere. But was this true?

Could there be a vast secret alliance of people in Syria, Iraq, Mecca, that had somehow remained undetected? Seemed that there was. Our old pal Ronald Stores, pencil mustache, real-life clue character, had a fresh new letter from Hussein, saying the exact same corroborating shit. the stipulations matched exactly. Ronald also had additional intel. Britain had 30 days to figure out if they were all in or if they were going to fuck off. Because young Turk Dijamal, Pasha, had promised full Arab independence if the Arabs promised the Ottoman Empire their loyalty and support. So which side were they going to align themselves with was very much still up in the air.

And all of this meant that Lawrence could start advocating for an assault on Alexandria once again. And they would need to attack soon. Bulgaria had just entered the war on the side of Germany, meaning there was now a direct land route between the Ottoman Empire and Germany for sending troops, weapons, and supplies. And that meant that British Egypt was probably going to be targeted anew, this time by a bigger, much better prepared enemy.

But taking Alexandreda would cut off this new possible supply line. Secretary of War Kitchener liked this idea, but in London, the reception was still mixed, due to the continuing carnage on the Western Front, and Gallipoli was still fresh in their minds. Still, it did seem like the plan was going to move forward. In an October 24th letter, the British High Commissioner to Egypt, Henry McMahon, declared that subject to certain modifications,

quote, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sharif of Mecca. But then a French liaison found out about this new twist. Uh-oh, not happy. November 13th, the French military attaché, in London handed the letter to General William Robertson, the chief of the British Imperial General Staff and overall commander of the British Army. After reassuring France's economic and political interests in Syria, the letter stated that French public opinion could not be indifferent

to anything that would be attempted in a country that they consider already as being intended to become a part of the future French-controlled Syria. And they would require of the French government that not only could no military operation be undertaken in this particular country before it has been concerted between the allies, but even that should such an action be taken, the greater part of the task should be entrusted to the French troops and the generals commanding them. Basically, France is like, back the fuck off

unless you want this alliance between our nations to get folded faster than a clean towel that just came off the clothesline. To Lawrence's great frustration, the plan was quashed again in November of 1915, thanks entirely to France's imperialist ambitions. This on the heels of another tragic loss. Just a few weeks prior, on October 23rd, Will Lawrence's plane had been shot down over France. He's really not having a lot of fucking

luck with France right now. Lawrence of Arabia is not. Will had been an aerial spotter for the Royal Flying Corps, a job that carried with it one of the shortest life expectancies for any soldier in the war. He had died at the age of 26. He was again just a year younger than Ned. The two, as expected had been very close close. Lawrence never a very outwardly emotional person wrote to a friend on November 16th. I'm rather low because first one and now another of my brothers has been killed.

Of course, I've been away a lot from them and so it doesn't come on one like a shock at all, but I rather dread Oxford at what it may be like if one comes back. Also, they were both younger than I am, and it doesn't seem right somehow that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo. for Lawrence, someone who was naturally happiest,

pushing himself to his physical limits, sitting in a hotel room, writing reports while his brothers were fighting and dying on the front line was an intolerable experience. What was worse, the war itself had gone nearly nowhere. It likely felt to Lawrence that his brothers had died in vain. The Western Front had barely moved in a year.

On the eastern front, Russia had been mauled by German forces, then took revenge on the Austro-Hungarian armies, only to be brutalized again when Germany came to Austro-Hungary's rest. you. The newly opened Southern Front in northern Italy, Italy had just joined on the side of Britain, France and Russia, saw Italy flinging its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force only to be fucking slaughtered each and every time. A stunning lack of progress earned at a horrific cost, at a horrific cost. And there was no sign of the war slowing down in time soon. Right now everyone wanted to see their enemies reduced to ash, never able to recover. Every side wanted to take what they already viewed as theirs from the losing side. And if they couldn't do that on any of the three fronts in Europe, by God, they were going to do it in the Ottoman Empire. Russia had wanted to take Constantinople for at least 200 years. France, of course, really fucking wanted Syria.

And Britain had been obsessed with protecting land approaches to British India from its imperial rivals. That is France and Russia. And all three strongly Christian countries were looking forward to a little crusades rematch. Even if the question of France's claims was resolved, the idea of allying with Hussein and promising Arab independence seemed fine in theory, but India was Britain's largest colonial outpost and had 80 million Muslims living inside his borders. It seemed foolhardy, maybe even downright dangerous to encourage revolt in one part of the Muslim world, while the British desperately hoped to keep control of another. So what were they going to do now? The man who would help answer that question

arrived in Cairo on November 17th. His name was Sir Tatten, Benvenuto, Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet of Sledmir. That's a fucking lot of words. That's too many. And yes, he did, of course, have a lordly mustache that matched his name. Quite thick and majestic and very British somehow. And thankfully, he did not go by his full name and title. He just went by Mark Sykes. Hmm, that's better. Mark was the only child of a Yorkshire aristocrat who had traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire,

been a soldier in the Second Boer War, and served in a variety of diplomatic positions all before the age of 25. Damn. Then he got married, had five kids, one of a reprimand, reputation as an accomplished caricature artist, random, invented an early version of the overhead projector, more random, and served in Parliament. Who was this guy? The previous spring, the 36-year-old Sykes had been appointed as an advisor to a board designed to guide the British Cabinet on Middle Eastern Affairs. Like Lawrence, he had done a study on the people of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike Lawrence,

he did not come from a place of compassion and empathy. After first dividing people into categories called the ancients and the moderns, Sykes offered up subcategories. Thus, Class 1 of the ancients were the orthodox, hard, unyielding, bigoted, and fanatical, while Class 1 of the Moderns, the highest type, denoted a person of good family who has entirely absorbed a Western education. Not to be confused with the Class 2 moderns, who were the poor, the incompetent, or the criminal, who have received an inferior European education, and whose minds by circumstances or temperament, or both, are driven into more sinister channels than the first class. class. Not content and there, Sykes proceeded to apply his formula to various region of the Middle

East, offering his British readers an easy-to-follow guide to their nation's standing in each. He didn't paint a pretty picture of a place like Egypt, frankly, from the Class 1, 2, and 3 ancients, absolute hostility, benevolent apathy, and mild approval, respectively, added to the unforgiving hatred amongst the Class 1 and Class 2 moderns. This was not helpful. Not merely because it neglected, but much of the war. or had been predicated on so far. That groups of people did not hate each other in a vacuum, but developed systematic worldviews

where they could ally with people they otherwise disliked if it gave them some competitive advantage and in it in a arena full of different groups with both ages old and brand new prejudices you could definitely find some common ground to connect over. But the Stodgy British government liked Sykes' simple, PowerPoint-like presentation, and they put them in charge of sorting out

competing territorial claims of Great Britain and our allies like France in the Middle East. And Sykes had no problem with making promises to both sides, both Hussein and France. In just a few days of meetings in early January, 1916, Mark Sykes and Francois, Georges Picot, a French diplomat, cobbled together a future map of the Middle East that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one envisioned by Amir Hussein.

The new independent Arab nation would now be limited to the most arid, inhospitable desert wastelands of Arabia, sweet, with the French taking control of Syria and the British taking control of Iraq, and Palestine would fall under the Joint Administration of France, Great Britain, and Russia. Mark Sykes never let Pico know that all of this directly contradicted the tentative agreement that McMahon had already come to with Hussein. So much double-crossing when it comes to war, which I guess is not surprising. Right, it's often all about getting whatever you can, however you can. Lawrence, meanwhile, was still under the assumption that if France finally agreed to the creation of an independent Arab state, the assault on Alexandreda could go forward finally. In late January, he wrote a long report titled Politics of Mecca,

designed to allay concerns back in London, concerns feverishly stoked by India, of what a unified Arab nation under Hussein's leadership might mean to Britain's long-term interest in the region. By that time also, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, a tribal chieftain's most formidable rival in Arabia, had asserted his claim that nobody would follow Hussein if he declared himself Caliph. And since Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud was British India's main source of information on Arabia, the British government was primed to listen to him.

So now it seems like two different branches of the British crown might be backing two sworn rivals in Arabia. Less a recipe for a successful revolt, more a recipe for a British civil war, right? Jesus Christ. Lawrence warned, that this was not a good solution to back Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, who was a member of a radically conservative sect of Islam called the Wahhabists. Some extra puritanical zealots who emphasized a literal interpretation of Sharia law,

it would be much harder to have them as allies down the line. These fuckers wanted people to lose a hand when they steal, right? Women to lose their brains, one stone's throw at a time, if they're said to have been unfaithful, even deciding to no longer be a Muslim is a crime punishable by death. right so is homosexuality women have to get permission from men to marry to divorce to even travel these are some real long beard stern face hearts full of hate have an old testament angry god motherfuckers not a fan lawrence was right about the british having a hard time keeping them as allies

in 1923 aben saud would conquer much of the arabian peninsula and to honor his clan give it the name of saudi arabia for the next 90 plus years the vast saudi royal family will survive by essentially buying off the Wahhabists who had brought them to power financially subsidizing their activities so long as their disciples directed their jihadist efforts abroad. Most famous product of this arrangement, a man named Osama bin Laden. And Saudi Arabia is still backwards as fuck right now. Their government is morally bankrupt and, in my opinion, frankly, evil. I think it's disgusting that the U.S. government is friendly with these ruthless human rights hating motherfuckers, but I'm getting distracted. Back in March of 1916, something would draw Britain out of it, should we go with

Abin-Saud, or should we go with Hussein, or should we go with France paralysis? It would have to do with the British Indian advance in Iraq. That march, as the 36th Indian Infantry Brigade advanced on the town of Dujela in central Iraq, they found the fort deserted. Their's for the taking. They decided to proceed by nightfall to do a quick sunrise bombardment, but the abandonment of the town's citadel was a surprise, and so the Indian infantry was ordered to go back to the British main lines where they could reassess.

This was a terrible idea because by mid-morning, Turkish reinforcements had arrived and began to slaughter the new Indian advance, falling 4,000 without a single one reaching the citadel. This was especially important because a large swath of the British Army, who had come from India, had been stranded in the Iraqi city of Kut, and were desperately awaiting reinforcement. Predictions stated they would run out of food by mid-April. Lord Kitchener decided that there was no longer time for debating who Britain should side with.

It was time to use anyone and everyone they could to get on their side. side. It was time to, you know, yeah, anybody who would join them, they need it. So on the morning of March 22nd, 1916, the passenger ship Royal George slipped from its birth at Port Suez and turned south to the Red Sea, embarking on a 14-day journey around the Arabian Peninsula to southern Iraq. Lawrence was on board carrying a letter from high commissioner Henry McMahon to Sir Percy Cox, British India's chief political officer in Iraq. My dear Cox, the letter said, come on. My dear Cox, I send these few lines to introduce Captain Lawrence,

who is starting today for Mesopotamia under orders from the W.O. War Office to give his services in regard to Arab matters. He is one of the very best of our able intelligence staff here and has a thorough knowledge of the Arab question in all its bearings. I feel sure that you will find him of great use. There are actually two purposes to Lawrence's mission. The first one was to try to get the British Indian commanders in Iraq, Iraq, to see the wisdom of working with Arab tribes, something Lawrence had been advocating for for

at least two years now. The plan was to start sending out a group of Iraqi Arab officers who had defected from the Turks and were now working for the British in Egypt so that they might forge alliances with local Iraqi tribal leaders as well as peel away disgruntled Arab units of the Ottoman army. But that wouldn't do anything to help the British Indian troops still stuck in Iraq. This was the second part of Lawrence's mission. He was going to try and bribe the Turkish commander of the coup siege into letting the army go in return for one million British pounds worth of gold. Damn. This was completely unprecedented in British military history. On the morning of April 5th, the Royal George docked at Basra, and already Lawrence's first

mission had been made irrelevant. The new commander-in-chief of the Indian Army Expeditionary Force in Iraq, General Percy Lake, had already dismissed the scheme as undesirable and inconvenient. And his second mission was fuck too. The British Army in Iraq based on a toxic mask of racism and notions of its own military superiority just could not accept they might lose to the Ottoman army again at Kut. Upon hearing of the generous surrender terms offered by Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander at Kut, General William Robertson inferred that they were only offering such good terms because the Turks themselves were in trouble. By the time Lawrence was shuttled up the Tigris River to join the front line headquarters staff on April 15th. A third relief effort in Coot was underway.

And the result was even worse. Ten thousand dead and wounded, no breakthrough. Should have just paid him the money. Now with the trapped garrison reaching starvation, the generals there decided to accept Kitchener's scheme and the role Lawrence had come to play in it. The ransom would move forward after all. On April 29, 1916, Lawrence and two other officers, Edward Beach and Aubrey Herbert were ushered, blindfolded, passed a no man's land full of rotting corpses into Khalil Pasha's headquarters consisting of a single round tent set four miles back from the front lines. I might legit be pissing myself in that situation.

That's some brave shit. Lawrence could have easily ended up getting executed here. They offered the ransom in the disguise of humanitarian aid for the civilian residents of Kut. And Khalil Pasha immediately turned them down. very unexpected. He did, however, agree to lead British steamers or to allow British steamers to bring some food supplies

and take some of the worst of the wounded home. That concession encouraged Colonel Beach, the senior negotiator to offer an exchange of able-bodied prisoners, the survivors in Coot in return for the Ottoman prisoners the British had taken since first coming to shore in Iraq. Khalil offered an alternative,

a one-for-one exchange of British soldiers for Turkish ones and Indian soldiers for Arabs. Khalil confided in them that he didn't really care though about getting any of the Arab soldiers back. He considered them cowardly and had already decided that they would be executed once returned.

What a fucking emotional roller coaster for those poor bastards. You've been liberated! Now put this news around your neck real quick. What? Soon after all this was discussed, the meeting ended, and the three officers were given dinner

and allowed to stay the night. The next day, British forces formerly surrendered in Kuut. Lawrence then set out to return to Cairo from Iraq, and on May 11th having accomplished little of what he had been sent to do. He was very frustrated. In 13 months, the British had suffered some 350,000 casualties without ever once listening to the ideas that Lawrence and others who knew the region so well and people had proposed. The seeds of anti-imperialism or of anti-imperialism that had been developing in Lawrence for years were now really starting to take root.

the British Empire claimed to be the most sophisticated in the world, and yet it threw its own people into futile battles, like their lives meant nothing, lives such as the lives of Lawrence's brothers, as its generals continued to place pride before practicality. Meanwhile, as Lawrence resumed his post in Cairo, the situation had rapidly eroded between the governor of Syria, Dijamal, Pasha, and the Hussein's.

The Husseins have been trying to keep notable Arab families and intellectuals from being tried and executed as traitors, and eventually Di Jemal called their bluff. Were the Hussein's with him or against him? They professed to be with him, but when Di Jemal Pasha sent 3,500 troops to Yemen, Amir Hussein decided they were really coming for him. He told his son Faisal to get out of Damascus,

and on June 5, 1916, Amir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city's Turkish fort. This was a signal to launch a new rebellion. And by the end of the day, Hussein's followers had launched a task against a number of Turkish strong points across the length of the Hajas. By an odd twist of fate, the Westerner who had done more than any other Westerner to bring that revolt to fruition would never learn of it.

Shortly before 5 p.m. on that same day, a Royal Navy battleship cruiser, HMS, Hampshire, left its port northern Scotland to transport war secretary Horatio Kichner to Russia. Less than three hours later, the Hampshire struck a German mine, quickly sank in high seas. Nearly every man on board died, including Kitchener. But the Arab revolt was now full steam ahead. The next day, Amir's, pun not intended, the next day, Amir's youngest son, Zaid, made contact with Ronald Storrs,

that British Secretary of Egypt, asked him for 70,000 pounds to bankroll the rebel forces. Storge managed to get him 10,000 pounds, five cartons of cigarettes, and the promise of a maxim machine gun. Capitalized on the element of surprise, Hussein's rebels quickly overpowered the tiny Turkish force in Mecca, and with the help of a British naval bombardment,

the all-important port of Jeddah. Then they took possession of Taif in the mountains below Mecca, but things didn't go so well in Medina. There, the rebels emboldened by reports of a quick success in Mecca had charged into the teeth of a vastly larger and entrenched Turkish garrison some 10,000 soldiers and been slaughtered by machine gun and artillery fire. A month into the revolt, an uneasy stasis setting, with Hussein's forces firmly in control of Mecca and Jeddah and the Turks firmly in control of Medina.

But even so, the Brits were thrilled. Since Hussein was one of the Arab world's most respected leaders and the custodian of Islam's holiest shrines, it seemed like the Muslim revolt might spread to the furthest reaches of the empire now. More importantly, they had gotten there before the Turks and Germans galvanized the Muslims from their side. But militarily, the British were a little uneasy. They were excited about the possibility of tying down large numbers of Turkish troops so the Brits could get into Palestine, but on the other hand,

it didn't seem like a wider Arab uprising was coming, and the Brits didn't want to have to send forces to bail Hussein's men out. And this was especially complicated because non-Muslims, according to Hussein's interpretation of Scripture, were not even allowed to step foot inside Mecca or Medina. For fuck's sake. Though fucking weird rules, we pull out of our asses,

and expect everyone else to abide by will forever confound me. No, no, no. you don't believe this? No, God said you can't step foot inside the city. Sorry. Sometimes Hussein seemed to be wavering and begging for help, but then they would see him in newspapers proclaiming that no Westerners could be allowed in Islam's holiest cities. It was very confusing.

So Britain worked in the shadows around the margins, smuggling in weapons and gold, along with whatever Muslim troops from their side could be spared. By October of 1960, the Arab Revolt was now reaching a tipping point. The Turkish garrison in Medina had strengthened and pummeled a rebel attack, led by Faisal, Hussein's third son, and Hussein had finally accepted that he needed British help. Ronald Stores headed over to Jeddah with Lawrence at his side, but they were soon informed that they were to deliver the opposite information they had intended,

that there would be no British troops coming to the raid. London had changed its mind. They told this to Abdullah, Hussein's second son, on the day they landed, October 16, 1916. At the meeting, Lawrence got to observe the man up close, and though Abdullah had been acting as a sort of field marshal, Lawrence thought that the revolt had reached a stasis because there was no true leadership from him.

Addull was a good statesman with political experience, but not a leader of men, someone who could appeal to people's hearts and minds. They also found that the French, not to be outmaneuvered by their ally Britain, had already established a diplomatic post in Jeddah. They were worried as they had been this whole time that an Arab revolution might put a serious stop

in their imperial agenda. That night, the French colonel, Eduardo Bremen explained to them that the Arabs must not be allowed to take Medina. That way the Arab revolt could be contained there and not spread to Palestine and Syria where the British and French intended to again take control. He told them that they had to make sure that the rebellion succeeded in putting a dent in the Turkish army, but not succeed any more than that. Bremen, of course, said all of this, assuming he was amongst friends, but he wasn't.

Lawrence, in thinking about leadership and the Arab revolt, was already making his own plans, and he would start putting them into action the very next day. The next morning, he told Abdullah that what the revolt needed was reliable information on the ground, someone neutral, who could go around taking the temperature of things, and he volunteered himself. Abdullah agreed, even agreeing to Lawrence going into the mountains above Rabig, a little town, linking Medina and Mecca, where non-Muslims generally were not allowed, if Hussein's elder son Ali thought it was appropriate. And so, So on October 19th, while stores sailed back to Egypt, Lawrence stayed in Arabia.

Then it was on to meet Ali, 37, and Zaid, the youngest Hussein son, 20. Ali seemed like more of a natural leader to Lawrence, but he also wanted to meet Faisal, the third son. That meeting would take place on the night of October 21st. Lawrence was permitted to enter the Arabian interior, but his mission was kept absolutely secret. Even Ali's household slaves. And yes, this fucker still had legit slaves in the 20th century, because it was still

illegal in the Ottoman Empire, did not know about the Westerner in their midst. Lawrence had to grit his teeth endure a 30-hour camel ride with only two short breaks, wearing traditional Arab robes over his military uniform in the sweltering heat. To distract himself, he made careful notes about the geography and the people he came across just as he had when he lived in Syria. He soon found that there were clear differences between Syria and where he was now. For example, in Syria, the price for transgression was most often ostracism. perhaps the handing over of a sheep in the form of a fine.

In Arabia, it was often fucking death. Lawrence, while probably in a constant state of, God, I really hope I don't give brutally fucking murder right now anxiety, made note of any fortifications the British could provide against the Turks, identifying two unprotected waterways that have been left off of British maps. On the afternoon of October 23rd, the party descended into the verdant valley of Wadi Sufra, where Faisal's army had taken refuge after its failure.

you're at Medina. There at a long low house where a legit sword-wielding slave stood guard, how the fuck is just one century ago? Lawrence met Faisal. Faisal had done the better part of the fighting and organizing since the Arab revolt had begun. Now they were running out of supplies, though, in ammunition and faced an imminent Turkish march that would either leave the rebels stranded in the mountains or beating a retreat back to Mecca. But he seemed like a natural leader, more than any of Hussein's other sons. He had managed to bring together the various tribes and claims across the breadth of Western Hajaz, some a full two weeks journey from their homelands, and even though they had been defeated, their confidence was still high.

Next, Lawrence made for Yanbu, a port town where a British ship could take him back to Egypt, but the British ship did not come. So the now 28-year Lawrence spent the next five days writing 17,000 words on his experience in Arabia. He wrote pages upon pages on how clan and tribal alliances worked, how the structure played out on the back. battlefield, and most of all, how rare it was to find someone who could get everybody to cooperate. With his knowledge of medieval military strategy, he inferred how the rebel forces might move according to what they would need, animals, supplies, etc. He also saw that it would never be a conventional European-style army. The only way forward was for the British to adapt,

to hand over the reins. He also offered other practical solutions. For one, he said there was no way to bring over a bunch of British soldiers to help. The Arabs would not tolerate infidels on their turf, and it would undermine Faisal standing to support that. Lawrence thus argued for a minimal British presence with Faisal at the helm, Not Abdullah. On October 31st, 1916, Lawrence, right? It's Halloween. He goes trick-or-treating now in Saudi Arabia. His costume was a mash-up of the Prophet Muhammad and a burlesque dancer. At each house he would go to, he would undress out of his robe into a sparkly sequined thong and some pasties with glittery tassels on his nipples, while doing a sexy little dance

and he got three pieces of candy before his head was chopped off for heresy. Wait, wait, no wait, right date, wrong details. No, on Halloween, October 31st, 1916, Lawrence was picked up by a ship and returned to Jeddah. He thought he was going back to Cairo where the British and French presence in Jeddah

was very interested in what he had to say about his time with Faisal. But they wouldn't really like what he had to say. Lawrence advocated for basically leaving the Arabs alone. But the French wanted the presence of some 3,000 men there to keep the revolt from reaching Syria, as Bremen wanted. General Archibald Murray didn't think much of it either. He didn't want to send anyone over to what he called a sideshow in Arabia. In fact, they were already ready to go full steam ahead with their own plans and send a large force to Rabig, but the British War Committee had declined.

So when Lawrence arrived and reported that any presence in Arabia should be a minimum one, the higher-ups were not thrilled. then he informed them that Faisal ought to be the true leader, not Ali or Abdullah, and nobody liked that either. Faisal was the most distrusting of European influence, and he had the most connections to Syria, which France wanted to keep out of the conflict. And England needed France to feel good about this, too, or the whole thing would fall apart again. Lawrence felt everyone's resistance for the same old reasons and decided it was time to stop being Mr. Nice Guy now. Back in Cairo in mid-November, he went home and wrote a memorandum of what needed to happen in Arabia. And this time he kind of went off. accusing the French of putting their imperialist agenda above good military policy and seeking to destroy the Arab revolt from within exactly as Edouard Bremen had said.

It was France's fault for blocking the Alexandreda plan that they were in this situation to begin with, and they couldn't take the fall for France and lose a lot more British lives because France threatened to throw another hisy fit. Meanwhile, General Reginald Wingate, who had heard about Lawrence's trip, wanted to send him to Janbo to be his liaison to Faisal. he arrived there in early December, set out back to and set out to head back to Faisal's camp in the mountains on December 2nd, 1916. When he met up with Faisal, however, he found that the plans Faisal had laid out in October to take his campaign north while his brothers occupied Turkish forces elsewhere had completely gone awry.

Zaid had left Yonbo completely unguarded and cut off from their escape route to the coast, Faisel's army had completely scattered. Faisel and his lieutenants had finally halted the flight there in Nokkel, Mu Barak, but even this, he confided to Lawrence that night probably wouldn't hold. Lawrence raced back to Yanbu to raise the alarm. Tribes abandoning Faisal was not a good thing. In fact, it was about the worst thing. And since Lawrence had staked his plans on Faisal becoming a good leader, it now looked bad

for Lawrence as well. The crisis then got worse, and by December 9th, Faisal's army had been reduced from 5,000 to 2000. But when Turkish forces appeared on the 12th, they hesitated upon seeing the British ships in the harbor and turned back to Medina. so there was no immediate need for a French British army to charge in and save anyone. Around then, this time the coalition government back in London of Herbert Asquith had fallen, replaced by a new government led by David Lloyd George.

The new prime minister was determined to break with the westerner mindset that held that victory could only be achieved on the Western Front. Instead, George wanted to try to knock out the weakest spots of the central powers, the Ottoman Empire being one of them. British presence along the Hajaz Hajazi coast now increased and they were all surprised to see their countrymen T.E. Lawrence, not wearing his

British military uniform but Arab robes now instead. He also spent little time with the British camp, preferring to stay at the Arab encampment with Faisal, talking to various allies, making alliances with deals and deals with tribes. Faisal was now focused on taking his campaign north and seizing the small port

town of wage that would bring the British supply line from Egypt 200 miles closer, and Lawrence would be at his side. It was as though the medieval histories he had read as a kid were now taking place in real life. He would write, Faisal in front in white, chieftain Sharoff on his right in red headcloth, and hennadine tunic and cloak, myself on his left in white and red. Behind us three banners of purple silk with gold spikes, behind them three drummers playing a march, and behind them a wild, bouncing mass of 1,200 camels of the bodyguard, all packed as closely as they could move,

the men in every variety of colored clothes, and the camels nearly as brilliant in their trappings, and the whole crowd singing to the tops of their voices, a war song, in honor of Faisal and his family. Yeah, quite a sight. At the same time, Lawrence dreaded being recalled to Cairo. He wanted to stay there where he was, but Stuart Newcomb, who was to be his official replacement, showed up on January 18, 1917, and Lawrence was supposed to be. to go back. But Stewart decided that he wanted the young man to stay. He needed someone to help him make a proper introduction, and Lawrence all too happy to comply. They managed to rally their troops to now

include over 10,000 warriors drawn from half a dozen different tribes and many more clans, but the newly reconstituted force found waged to be nothing more than a smoking, shattered ruin. Expecting Faisal two days earlier, the British had already been there with the small force of Arab fighters who had seized the city. Faisal, now in a position to demand a favor from the British, requested that Lawrence's position be made permanent. And it was. He would stay in Arabia for the foreseeable future. And this is how he becomes Lawrence of Arabia. He was only briefly brought back to Cairo to give accounts of what he was going on across the Red Sea, where he gave a glowing review of Faisal, even managed to give some excuses for his tardiness and arriving in wage. The next plan was to move onto the port

of Akaba, but once again the French wanted to be involved. Fucking French, constantly thwart his plans. They wanted to send their own soldiers. Lawrence and Faisal were staunchly opposed to this, but the French found support in British officers who wanted to establish more direct supply lines. But the Arab army really wanted to go to,

galvanized by their increased numbers and somewhat of a win in wage. But Lawrence was worried for Faisal and for the Arabs. If they allowed the French and British to land a fighting force, would that fighting force ever leave? Or would it take control of the war? of the area and began its imperial conquest. Would the Arabs be blocked from spreading the revolution north? So Lawrence did what he felt like he had to do, technically an act of treason. He told Faisal

about the Sykes-Pico agreement, an agreement to divide up the Ottoman Empire into colonial territories once the war was done. Lawrence had seen a copy of it sometime in 1916 when he was in Cairo. The effect of this telling was dramatic. Faisal now understood that the British were not going to simply give over Syria or really any part of the area. If the Arabs wanted it, they would have to take it. They'd have to fight for it. Faisal turned away from the Akbar operation now, focusing on carrying his forces into the Syrian heartland.

He told British and French officers as much, who were puzzled over why things had changed so suddenly. But nobody suspected Lawrence. Meanwhile, Di Jamal Pasha ordered the Turkish garrison to abandon Medina and began moving towards Syria to stop the rebel advance. This would give the Arab army an opportunity to get Medina something they had been wanting for a baby. very long time. Lawrence got a hold of this order on March 8th, along with an order for the British

generals to hold the Turks departure from Medina so they could not reach Gaza, where the British planned to launch a different attack. This put Lawrence in yet another difficult spot, but once again, he told Faisal and Faisal decided to send word to Abdullah via Lawrence. On the five-day journey to Abdullah's camp, one of Lawrence's retinue was shot by another member from a defending tribe. Arab custom demanded that the guilty man be put to death by the murdered man's kinsman, but was afraid that that would spark something of a civil war between the groups that made up the Arab army. The only solution he thought was to have a neutral third party performed the execution, and he volunteered himself. As he later recounted, I made Hamid enter a narrow gully of the spur,

a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain. I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments to lay, which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise. and I shot him through the chest. Lawrence would have to shoot him two more times before he died, and this was the first man he'd ever killed. Fucking brutal. Guessing that was something that haunted him.

They then arrived at Abdullah's camp on March 15th, where they decided that they needed to move against the railway immediately. That way, they could drive the Ottomans out of Medina without making it easier for them to rush off anywhere else, like Syria or Gaza. But Lawrence now faced another obstacle, malaria. He was on bed rest for 10 days while he recovered. he was irritated as he lay writhing that Abdullah seemingly made no move to do anything to the railway,

even though they had agreed on doing that. On March 25th, at last sufficiently recovered from his illness to function, Lawrence strode into Abdullah's tent to announce he would lead in attack against the railway himself now. And Abdullah was totally cool with that. He wasn't much of a fighter, as Lawrence had observed many months before. All during the day of March 29th, Lawrence and his advance team moved into attack positions in the hills around the Hajaz railway station while closely watching the Turkish soldiers

go about the routines, forming up for roll call, falling out for meals, performing drills, still oblivious to a trap being set for them. But he only had a force of 300 men, so Lawrence had to act carefully. He set some men up in the heights surrounding the station

so they could fire with the Turkish from a ring above them. A demolition team was sent to a place to place a mine some miles to the north, while he personally placed one to the south and set his sole machine gun to catch any Turkish that attempted to retreat back to Medina in a strategic place. At dawn on the 30th, the attack began. Within moments, two of the stations were reduced to rubble, and a train wagon was set on fire. Amidst the chaos, a train that had come the day before attempted to escape south,

Lawrence's mind did not go off in response, nor did his machine gun. He called off the assault, feeling like they had already done enough, though. They had killed or seriously wounded 70 soldiers, and Lawrence felt like he had reach a breakthrough, an epiphany about how to use the Arab soldiers at his command best. They were not going to be a European fighting force, charging in from the front, but more like, quote, an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas. With that unpredictability in so much open space, the Turkish could only scramble in response,

right? It was time for guerrilla warfare. He concluded that the best strategy was to keep the Turks in Medina, but allow just enough supplies to the railway station to keep them on life support, essentially prisoners. Then they can do the same thing in Syria, constantly ceding larger towns to the Turks, only to then trap them inside those towns. To do that, Lawrence wanted the same thing the British and French had wanted, control of Akaba, which would give a better supply line for the Arab army. But how to do that without getting the Westerners involved, he wondered? Could a small force of

soldiers go there and conduct a series of seemingly random raids to distract the Turkish forces as a bigger force then came to surprise them from behind. Lawrence set back out for wage in early April of 1917 to get back to Faisal. It was proving to be a turning point, not just for Lawrence, but for the broader conflict. A month before, the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and Russia had come to an end, thanks to those Bolshevik shiths, who would turn out to be far worse than the royals, and the country was in disarray during the first stages of what was to become the Russian Revolution. They were effectively out of the war now. And with that, U.S. President Woodrow, Wilson, who had hated the idea of a line with Tsarist Russia, decided that with a new moderate

government in Russia, I love that he felt that the Bolsheviks were moderate, the U.S. could come in. The U.S. declared war on Germany in the beginning of April, and though U.S. forces would not make it over for a while, it was a relief to the French and British who were getting closer and closer to financial collapse. Also, that planned British attack on Gaza had gone through on March 26th. It had gone poorly, and the British eventually retreated, suffering over 4,000 casualties, while inflicting less than half that. General Murray was now gearing up his forces in southern Palestine for his second try, which would in April of 1917 be just as disastrous with 6,000 casualties.

Lawrence, however, was on another mission to meet up with Aouda Abu Tahy, a leader of the fierce Huitat tribe of northwestern Arabia. He had a reputation as a fearless warrior, and Lawrence and Faisal desperately wanted him on their side. Here's how a Lawrence described this guy. He was married 28 times, has been wounded 13 times, and in his battles has seen all his tribes been hurt and most of his relations killed. He has only reported his kill since 1900, and they now stand at 75 Arabs.

Turks are not counted by Aouda when they are dead. This dude sounds scary as fuck. Also, 28 marriages? At this point, Lawrence was starting to think that Faisal wasn't demonstrating the leadership qualities he needed to. He was mostly concerned with staying on the coast, meeting with various tribes and clans. Instead of attacking the all-important Hajaz Railway and Akaba. So Lawrence put the plan in front of Faisal and his new ally, Aouda. Ada agreed quickly, and Faisal came around to the idea. On April 21st, Lawrence would interrogate 11 Turkish prisoners of war

who have been defending Akaba. They told him that there were rarely more than 100 soldiers ever protecting Akiba. He also got permission from the British War Authority. to head north with Aouda to disrupt the railway around the Syrian town of Mon. Before he did, however, on May 7th, he met with Mark Sykes, mixed her mustache.

Sikes had been on yet another duplicitous mission instead of getting French envoys to talk to King Hussein. That was what he was now calling himself. He had pretended that really the best thing to do was to talk to some Syrian representatives, people handpicked to be far more friendly to Western influence.

But now he had been commanded to go talk with Hussein himself. so he stopped by wage en route to confer with Faisal. Faisal, who knew about the Sykes-PICO agreement, knew not to trust this shady fucker. It appears, though there's no record of the meeting that Lawrence also confronted Sykes about his bogus promises to the Arabs and private.

Apparently, this meeting convinced Lawrence not to go to Mon as he had been authorized to do, but to do what he wanted now. He was going to go to Akaba and get shit done. That journey would take Lawrence in a force of 45 men 10 days before they reached El Hul, Arabic for the terror, a vast and waterless expanse

of northern Arabian desert empty of any obvious signs of life. Over four days, their lips grew cracked, their faces became chapped into blinding and blistering wind, giant waves of sand kicked up so hard, it was hard to see far in any direction. And on May 24th,

Lawrence noticed that there was one riderless camel in the midst of all this. Lawrence discovered it was Gassim's camel, a native of Mon, hopefully someone who would serve as Lawrence's liaison there. So Lawrence made a man. a snap decision to go back to find him secretly,

even though all traces of their path had vanished in the shifting sands and the wind. And Lawrence had to navigate only by his compass. Still, after an hour and a half, he found the delirious Qasim. This, however, did not make Lawrence a hero. In fact, his compatriots thought he was kind of an idiot for doing this. Lawrence was determined to make it across the desert with every man he could. And finally, they did reach the Wadi Sirhan, running in a northwest to southeast diagonal through the borderlands of Arrae.

Arabian, Syrian, modern-day Jordan. The 200-mile-long Wadi-Sirhan is a geological depression, a hundred-million-year-old narrow drainage valley. This was where Aouda arranged to have his kinsmen meet up with Lawrence's force. But it was a nightmare of a meet-up spot, rife with venomous snakes, snakes that killed three fucking dudes in just the first few days. And complicated customs that Lawrence had to follow lest he offend anybody, like attending elaborate days-long banquets.

Lawrence was also struggling personally, even though he'd resolved. resolved to do his part for the Arab revolt, he was still bitter about how Britain had made dual promises to France and the Arabs, and that the Arabs were almost certainly no matter what going to come out on the bottom. If there was any chance for an Arab nation to be fully independent, Lawrence thought they would have to take Syria to incite a true uprising, independent of any European help. So now that's exactly what Lawrence decides to do, to make a journey so hazardous as to be practically suicidal and to go against the interests of his own nation. He would embark on a 400-mile tour through enemy territory, beginning with arriving in Akaba, before proceeding to Syria.

Lawrence wrote the following in his notebook, addressed to General Gilbert Clayton, a British Army intelligence officer. Clayton, I've decided to go alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way. For all sakes, try and clear this show up before it goes any further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can't stand it. Figuring the notebook would eventually find its way into British hands, should he die in the mission, Lawrence left the notebook in Wadi Sirhan, and he set off for the north in the company of just two guides. It actually is largely unknown what would happen along this journey. Lawrence would only write about four pages on what happened. We do know that he secretly met with many prospective allies in the Arab revolt, tribal leaders, urban nationalists,

only to be greeted with a profound hesitation. Toward the end, he stopped in Azrock, a desert oasis in southeastern Syria. now Jordan, where a spring has led to humans living there for over a hundred thousand years. That's fucking wild. To meet with Emir Nuri Shalan, who led the vast Ruhalak tribe. He explained his intention to proceed to Syria. And then it seems that Shalon lent him some fighters because by June 18th they had some 500 fighters. Along the way, they had engaged in small scattered battles, for example,

blowing some shit up to convince the Turkish that a local insurrection was taking place, trying to keep them on their toes, and it worked. By mid-June, the Turks had dispatched a 400-man cavalry unit to hunt down the Phantom Rebel Force in Wadisirhan. But as Lawrence's group skirted below Mon on the afternoon of July 1st, they got word that there was a force of some 500 Turkish soldiers headed down towards them. They could try to continue on towards Akaba,

but that would mean the Turkish force would still be close behind them. So they had to destroy it. As dawn of July 2nd broke, the Arab warriors circled through the hills surrounding the past at Fuella, in cautious search of the Turkish Relief Battalion. They found them in a mountain pass just below Fuella, known as Aba El-Lasan,

encamped and still asleep along the banks of a stream. The airfighter circled the overhanging rocks and began to snipe at the men below, but it was so hot that they could only lie in any given shooting location, any position for just a few minutes before they would start to get burned. So Aouda decided they were taking the fight down to the ground. As we watched, Lawrence later recalled, two or three, Hoetot went down.

The rest thundered forward at marvelous speed and the Turkish infantry huddled together under the cliff, ready to cut their desperate way out towards Mon in the first dusk, began to sway in and out and finally broke before the rush. Now Lawrence's men wanted to take Mon to ransack it for plunder, but Lawrence turned them back towards Akaba, now just 40 miles away. It was a race towards the sea. As they crested the mountains and descended, the Wadi Itum toward Akaba, the fighters passed one empty Turkish blockhouse and trench line after another, proof of the brilliance of Lawrence's scheme. He had confused the Turkish so much that they had left Aqaba undefended from the interior.

After a tense two-day standoff with both sides were in desperately short of food, the Turkish commander finally accepted that his situation was hopeless and surrendered the port, July 6th, with barely a shot fired. But Lawrence knew they couldn't keep Aqaba, so the next day he set out in the direction of Egypt, hoping to cross the desert to reach British lines before it was too late.

He wandered into General Clayton Gilbert's office, July 10th, a thin figure in a dirty Arab robe. The only clue to who he was was his piercing blue eyes and familiar grin. Lawrence informed the general that he had done what the British had refused to do for months. He had captured, Akaba. Couldn't have come at a better time.

Things had not been going well for the Allies. Another Allied offensive on the Western Front had failed. The French army was mutining and the Russian government was collapsing. On the afternoon of July 12th, Lawrence, 135 pounds when healthy, but now weighing less than 100 pounds, my God, the fight he had taken quite a toll on him.

He'd been whittled down to just three feet tall by this point. His head's still 18 inches long and strong. He is truly half head now. He's tired. It's hard to ride a camel with those proportions, but he must fight on. Full transparency, I'm not 100% sure about my heightened head descriptions. I am much more sure that he was dressed in a white Arab robe and a turban, and that he met with General Bloody Bull Edmund Allenby,

where he explained the rest of his plan to isolate the Turkish and Little Island spread across the vast Syrian desert. There was a catch, though. For this grand Arab uprising to succeed, Lawrence told Allenby, it required a simultaneous British Army breakthrough in southern Palestine. Once that had been achieved,

the two forces could move north in lethal tandem, the Arab Irregular, shutting down the Hajaz Railway, and marooning the Turks in their garrison towns in eastern Syria, while the British army, their inland flank, protected by the Arab's actions,

advanced up the western coastal shelf. But they needed to do it no later than mid-September or the lynchpin of the force, the Bedouin fighters would have to leave trekking further east in search of foraging for their camels. And the generals signed on to a course that completely ignored French concerns and would eventually cast everything

that had been established with the Sykes Pico into doubt. So yeah, they agreed to do this. July 17th, Lawrence was taken from Port Suez to Jetta to meet with King Hussein to convince him to let Faisal's army be put in the command of General Allenby. It was Lawrence's first meeting with the king and to everyone's surprise Hussein agreed.

But Lawrence's mission to Arabia, not quite done. While he was still in Jeddah, word came from Cairo that according to a reliable informant, Lawrence's chief partner in the Akaba campaign, Aouda Abu Tayy, was now secretly negotiating with the Turks. He was going to switch sides. So now it's time to go to Akaba and confront his ally,

a very dangerous ally. Lawrence knew he couldn't outright call him out, right? It would offend him and he would get fucking killed. so using a combination of sympathy, flattery, and mild ridicule he managed to disarm Aouda and win him back for the rebel side. Rest of the month, and most of August of 1917, that would be spent turning Aqaba from a sleepy fishing town to the staging ground for the rest of the Arab revolt. British ships brought in thousands of fighters, a surge of new tribal recruits came in

from the surrounding mountains. Around the same time, the newly entered United States was now pressuring Britain and France to renounce colonial claims. Widrow Wilson's price for getting into the United States. the war was self-determination for all nations. Now, Mark Sykes was arguing that colonialism was madness and drawn up a new plan, a kind of political school system where the Middle Eastern states would first be educated in democracy, then turned over to self-govern.

It seemed like if Lawrence could out-maneuver Sykes and take his war on the Turks to the next level, he might be able to actually guarantee Arab independence once for all. Before the invasion of Syria, which still needed to be planned, it was up to Lawrence to destroy whatever Turkish supply lines he could along the way. One such supply line was a bridge near the rail station at Moodawara that Lawrence blew up on September 19th. As Turkish soldiers poured out of the train and caught on the tracks, Arab soldiers began to snipe them down. But other times were spent waiting in Akaba, where things were rapidly becoming overcrowded and a huge number of supplies were needed to

sustain the force gathered there. Finally, the date was set for Alambi's offensive, October 28. there would be a preliminary three-day bombardment of Gaza, after which the British would push north, severing supply lines to the Palestine interior. If all went well, the Turkish army in Gaza would be trapped. A small group of Arabs led by Lawrence, meanwhile, would strike at a bridge over the Yarmouk gorge, but it was risky.

They would be negotiating an alien landscape, constant prey to Turkish patrols and local tribes. General Allenby gave them the go-ahead to start this sometime early November, and Lawrence and his crew set out on October 24th. they wound their way through the spectacular Wadiram Wadiram mountains, but Lawrence had a couple reasons to be concerned. One, their guide,

Abd El Khadur was an Algerian exile who frequently classed with other members of their party. And two, right before they left, Lawrence got word that he was actually a Turkish spy. But since the person who warned him was French diplomat, Edouard Brehman, Lawrence wrote it off. He couldn't easily, he couldn't as easily write off the fact

that they were getting lost, though, almost directly heading into Turkish encampments, but by the 28th they had made it to their true danger zone the point of no return, and now it was time to go in. Meanwhile, General Alambi's offensive went off like clockwork. Catching the Turkish forces around Biersheba, off guard, the British cavalry had stormed into that desert town on the morning of October 31st.

Halloween again. That Halloween night, Lawrence, dressed up as a mashup of the Prophet Muhammad and Bozo the clown. He got five pieces of candy for a little red clown nose honking rubberfish juggling routine he put together before his head was cut off. No, that Halloween night, he and his men pressed on.

By November 7th, the Turkish garrison at Gaza, their lines of reinforcement cut and an imminent danger of being encircled had abandoned their trench works and begun a hasty retreat 20 miles up the coast. Bad weather prevented the British from pressing their advantage,

but they finally pierced the first and strongest defensive wall of Palestine. But there was no word from Lawrence. By November 12th, the British were seriously worried about it, And they were right to be. Lawrence had managed to find the Saraheen tribesmen. He had hoped to enlist for Yarmouk battles, reluctant to join. A chief reason was their deep mistrust of Abd El Khadur, whom they also suspected of being a traitor.

Finally, however, they did join, but then El Khadur disappeared. Last scene in a Turkish-held town, and Lawrence refused to turn back to try and find him. Probably was a traitor. They tried to blow up the railroad bridge now. It Tel al-Shabaab on the night of November 7th, but were quickly fired on and they had to high tail it out of there. But still Lawrence would not turn back. He wanted to launch another train attack,

even though they had lost their last fuse back on the 7th. Instead, the person who blew up the track would be a mere 50 feet, would have to be a mere 50 feet from the blast site, and that person would be, of course, Lawrence. He chose an isolated stretch outside of the village of Minifer below Amman. A first attempt failed, but he succeeded the next day. He was sent flying by the blast, though,

but somehow survived with no major injuries. Then he was grazed by five or so Turkish bullets, but survived, still, with no major injuries, other than getting another six inches or so knocked off of his height. He was now down to two feet, six inches tall. Do not forget, 18 inches of that is head incredible

that he could ride a camel or hold a gun. And again, don't quote me on the height references. Very untrustworthy source. 20 of his men, being serious now, were killed, but the rest of the party moved into Azrak, an Arab town where they could hide out and lick their wounds on November 12th. His mission had largely failed, but Lawrence was determined to keep going. Within a day of arriving, he found a courier on the 200-mile journey to Akaba,

with instructions for Faisal to begin bringing the vanguard of his army north. Then Lawrence's force began to repair the town for occupation. Just days later, Lawrence set off for the crucial rail town of Dara, not knowing it was there, he would endure the most horrific ordeal of his wartime experience. Lawrence wanted a firsthand look at Dara. All was going well until a passing Turkish army encampment captured him and his men. Uh-oh.

For the rest of the day, Lawrence was held on suspicion that he was a Turkish deserter. Then on November 20th, he was brought in to see Hajim, uh, Muhitin, the Dara district governor. Muhitin immediately pushed Lawrence down into the bed. And when Lawrence resisted, summoned guards to hold him down. Again, this is the governor. and this governor muhitten then begins to tear his clothes off, kissing and spitting on him, biting his neck until he draws his blood,

then cut him with a bayonet. The fuck is going on here. The kissing part was weird, right? Very homoerotic torture happening here. I'm going to beat you. I'm going to cut you. I'm going to kiss you. I'm going to passionately bite your neck

and maybe jerk you off a little bit until you come in my mouth. That'll teach you, infidel. I'm going to fucking pummel you. I'm going to gently massage your balls, maybe gag on your cock, and then stick it in my waiting, gaping asshole. and bounce up and down on your lap until you explode with pleasure,

and then you will talk, infidel. Following this interesting torture session, guards are ordered to take Lawrence out and teach me everything, according to Lawrence's later writings. That was his quote, teach me everything. Dragged into a nearby room, Lawrence has stretched over a bench where two of the guards,

quote, knelt on my ankles, bearing down in the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists until they cracked and then crushed them in my neck against the wood. What? A short whip was then retrieved, and the four guards took turns whipping Lawrence on his back and butt, dozens if not hundreds of times. Then Lawrence dazed, smiled at one of the guards, apparently, and the guy cracked him with a whip directly onto his cock and balls. Not kidding.

Not sure if he smiled after that or not, or if he came. Then he was hauled out in the courtyard where he was dumped into a shed. Naked the next morning, he managed to find some clothes, climb out of a window. Finally, he came to the small village where he managed to meet up with his Azrock companions. He's what the fuck? He escaped after all that. Many Lawrence biographers are unclear if all that happened quite the way he wrote it, since the torturer would have probably made him unable to walk at all,

much less escape to a nearby village miles away, but something bad happened. Those who knew him said he had an abrupt change of personality after this. He started to have a group of bodyguards, follow him at all times after that. Later to Charlotte Shaw, wife of playwright George Bernard Shaw, he would insinuate that he had surrendered to being. raped so that he would not be tortured even more extremely. He wrote, for fear of being hurt or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad,

I gave away the only possession we are born into this world with, our bodily integrity. Okay, I take back 100%. All of my sexual jokes from a few moments ago. Holy shit. From there, in January of 1918, he would go on to liberate Tefila, a small town in the mountain valley in northern Syria, where they would then launch on Curuk and Madiba, two larger settlements.

But then a large Turkish force came to retake the small town on the afternoon of January 24th, some 1,000 Turkish soldiers entered the valley. Lawrence's forces retreated, but managed to gain advantage on some high ground a few miles away. By the 25th, half this force,

some 500 Turkish soldiers had been wounded. A couple days later, he went down to Akaba to retrieve some gold that had been sent to pay the Arab forces. But a blizzard turned, the easy day long trip into a grinding three-day ordeal. He got back to Tefila, February 11th. But none of the forces there, especially Zaid Faisels,

were ready to push forward. Lawrence put Zade in charge of guarding the gold and proceeded on a reconnaissance mission, and when he got back, Zaid confessed he'd spent all the money. So Lawrence had to go back to Southern Palestine to see General Allenby where he begged to be transferred somewhere else. The business with Zade was perhaps just an excuse. Lawrence's nerves were fucking frayed.

He'd been riding a thousand miles each month on camels for a year and a half. He'd also, it seems, been raped and tortured. He's also no more than two feet tall at this point, but still possessed more courage to most men three times his size. Maybe. But when he reached headquarters on February 22nd, he discovered he already had a new mission. The British wanted to launch an all-out strike at the Syrian heartland,

and the Arab rebels would need to play a crucial role so he wasn't done. This was all because on November 9th, the British government had made yet more promises. This time to win the support of the Jews, they promise that there would be a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. That set off alarm bells across all Middle Eastern allies to the British. The Hussein's had sat by the British patiently, but now Hussein's own people were turning against him and going over to Abin Saud, his rival. Now Lawrence would need to go convince Faisal that the Arabs needed to be sympathetic to the Jewish people and just in general keep up Faisal and Hussein's morale for a British push into Syria. Finally, the Arabs agreed to go

ahead with the play. And so on the morning of April 2nd, Lawrence and a small entourage of bodyguards set out from Guera, bound for the Syrian interior. Lawrence was taking a force to a te tier, where he would conduct raids against the Turks, complimented by British forces. But the Turks and Germans had intercepted the British plans and surprise them. So Lawrence had to turn around and began an assault on Mon. By the time he got there, operations were already underway, but that was a failure too. He then made for Alambi's headquarters in Romley on May 2nd, where he was. informed that the troops that would have been sent to Syria had actually been stopped by France. Once again, Lawrence pitched a series of seemingly random assaults behind enemy lines now,

including the railroad town of Dara and Alambi agreed even signing over a couple thousand camels for him to use. This was actually great news. It meant that there would be no British push on Syria, the Arabs could take it for themselves. Meanwhile, playing on being mad at the British for the Balfour Declaration, a public statement made by the British government on November 2, 1917, during World War I, British support for establishing a national home for the Jewish people, Faisal hinted to the Ottomans that he would be willing to enter a peace treaty of certain garrisons of Turkish soldiers were removed. On June 18, 1918, Lawrence and Lieutenant Colonel Alan Donnie, the new overall

coordinator of operations in Northern Arabia, went to general headquarters to outline the plan for the Arab's independence advance into Syria. This was a new development, reinforces from Britain and India had arrived, so now the Arabs would dovetail their operations with the Egyptian expeditionary force. A date was set for this, September 19th. In the meantime, pressured by Arabs over the Balfour Declaration, Sykes and Pico announced that Britain recognized the complete and sovereign independence of the Arabs inhabiting those areas and support them in their struggle for freedom. Lawrence felt reaffirmed. Independence was on the horizon. But it seemed even more likely that the Arabs would only get the lands that they had freed themselves.

He swiftly got Faisal to put a pause on agreeing to a treaty with the Turks, and on the morning of August 7th, 1918, Lawrence would set off for the interior. He would lead a mixed force of several thousand allied fighters to Asrock and Syria, and Faisal Hussein arrived on September 12th. Lawrence, on the brink of total burnout now, I'm getting fucking tired, just fucking trying to figure all these words. I can't imagine what he went through, was about to collapse. He also recently learned that his assistant at the archaeological site,

Dahum had been killed in a typhus epidemic, but he couldn't quit now. Leaving Azrock on the morning of September 14th, Lauren spent the better part of a week, careening through the desert around Daraw in a Rolls-Royce armored car, blowing up bridges and tearing up railway tracks, dodging ineffective enemy air attacks,

skirmishing with the occasional unlucky Turkish foot patrol. I got! Lawrence then rejoined the main Arab force as it fell upon the railway north of Daraw on the morning of September 18th. Meanwhile, the British offensive was a massive success. When the Royal Flying Corps plane touched down at Azrock on the morning of September 21st, its pilot told of a British sweep up the Palestinian coast that had simply

steamrolled whatever scant Turkish resistance stood in its path. The Turkish resistance would head north up to Dara where Lawrence and its forces were waiting. But would they stay and fight the Turkish? Or would they move ahead to capture Damascus before the British got there? They would choose to believe the British and stay. A host of Arab bands, along with the British armored car unit, descended on the Hajaz Railway below Dara to render it damaged beyond repair for the foreseeable future. By September 25th, there were only 4,000 Turkish soldiers

left in the area, most of them having made a break for Damascus. But Lauren soon found that the Turkish had left all the villages and ruins. Children slaughtered, women raped, often killed as well, fucking brutal. That galvanized Lawrence and his men to show no mercy as they now mowed down any retreating Turkish soldiers they came across.

They fought by the ethos now of take no principles. prisoners. And now that the Turkish army had collapsed, the British officially allowed the Arab army to go ahead to Damascus. So in the very early morning hours of September 30th, Lawrence set off north in the Rolls-Royce sedan he had dubbed the blue mist towards Damascus. They arrived that evening, and a final charge would take place at dawn. All night, Turkish and Germans blew up their ammunition and fuel storage depots and then fled the city. Damascus belonged to the Arabs and the British now. It was a day of riotous celebration, or it would have been, except the city's political future was still very much up for debate. Faisal had set up a provisional government,

but then the British showed up and said they wanted to appoint the Turkish governor to continue to run the city. But really, Lawrence himself would actually, as the liaison between the Arabs and the British, be the de facto ruler of Damascus, because everybody trusted him. But he didn't feel good about that. There were so many sick, dead and dying around most of them Turks, and now he started to see the campaign of terror he had been inflicting for years in real human terms. Nonetheless, he did did his duty, meeting with the Arab delegates and British generals, including Allenby on October 3rd, now was time to decide what to do with the Middle East. As Syria had been captured, the French had desperately reasserted their claim to Syria, and on September 23rd, the British

had agreed. But the Arabs were occupying Damascus, so all of the official instructions said something to the effect of, have Britain and France set up an independent Arab administration, which made absolutely no sense. This was alarming for Lawrence, for a number of reasons, the Balfour declaration among them. He understood that Sykes-Picot was dead or had understood that. But also, things did seem to be tilting towards Arab independence. So what the fuck was a solution actually going to be? Things would then take an ugly turn. At the October 3rd meeting, Al-Nbee announced that France was to be the, quote, protecting power of Syria. And Syria's boundaries would not include any of Palestine or Lebanon, effectively making Syria a landlocked state.

Lawrence and Faisal were stunned. Faisal immediately objected. But Al-Nbee said, but Al-Bee's said that by Faisal's own agreement, Alamie was the commander of the Arab army, and he had no choice. After Faisal left, Lawrence immediately requested leave as well. Not a few days' rest, but to go home to England. He would not work for a French liaison officer,

not now, not ever. Everything he had worked for for years, even betrayed his own country for, had quickly crumbled to dust and he wanted out. He would even eventually reject to be knighted by the British crown. That's how angry he was about how this ended. He left Damascus the very next day.

Meanwhile, they were still fighting to be done. The EEF and their Arab allies pursued the remnants of the Turkish army north until finally Turkish general Mustafa Kamal agreed to negotiate for peace. That culminated in the armistice of Mudros on October 31st, and just about at that same time,

the three Pashas who had ruled the Ottoman Empire, including Di Jamal, slipped aboard a boat, and made their escape. Then Bulgaria fell at the end of September, with Austro-Hungary following six days later, Germany held out until November 11th, when an armist was finally signed. What followed in Paris was a year-long shutdown or showdown, excuse me, between the allies who wanted everything they had promised themselves and Woodrow Wilson, who insisted on a peace without victory.

Lawrence continued to try to advance the Arab cause, acting as Faisal's counselor, but Lawrence's usefulness the British government was over now. And so he had no influence. Government officials now started to call him a, quote, malign influence. and someone responsible for our troubles with the French over Syria. He was eventually stripped of all his credentials and barred from further talks. Interestingly enough, the Arabs did find a new ally in Haim Weissman, soon to be the first president of Israel.

The two came to an agreement, the establishment of an independent Arab state in Syria for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. But by going into partnership with the Zionists, Faisal just handed his more conservative Arab and Muslim rivals a powerful, weapon to use against him, which bin Saud, future founder of Saudi Arabia would. And Saudi Arabia, by the way, would have to wait until 1932 to be properly born.

And we can do a whole episode about the Paris peace talks. But let's focus on how they affected the lands Lawrence fought in and move on. The British would indeed hand over a carved-up Syria to the French under the newly appointed mandate system in November of 1919. Iraq would go to the British. Lawrence's friend Faisal would rule it under the British as king, though these mandates were intended to prepare the countries for self-rule, they created more unrest and resistance as local populations opposed foreign control,

viewing it as a continuation of the same old colonialism rather than as a pathway to autonomy. As a result, instead of fostering genuine independence, it often deepened divisions and created conflicts that persisted long after independence was achieved. And Lawrence seemed to know that that was bound to happen. His mother would later tell the biographer that he seemed deeply depressed, around this time, often sitting in the same place, staring blankly ahead for hours at a time. He did find some energy to write, having been elected to a seven-year research fellowship at Oxford to work on his book. So that's good, right?

He was going to get paid for seven years to write one book. Sounds like a pretty cushy gig compared to what he'd been doing. That book titled Seven Pillars of Wisdom would eventually be published in 1926 and it told the full story, or as much of the full story as Lawrence was a million to admit to, of his time in Arabia. In a bridged version, Revolt in the Desert will be published in 1927, and now let's head back to 1920. Lawrence spent time briefly in Jerusalem, where he met Lowell Thomas, who would eventually produce a stage play about Lawrence called With Allenby in Palestine. Thomas later added more photos of Lawrence in full Arab dress to the lecture portion of the show and changed the name to With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.

Quickly becomes Lawrence of Arabia. Now he's a household name, a central part of the British story of World War I. For a few years, Lawrence will serve as an advisor to Winston Churchill, but he hated bureaucratic work. He traveled to the Middle East multiple additional times, though he became somewhat of a scapegoat in Syria, when the French used Lawrence as an excuse to explain why their rule there wasn't going well. Itching to get back to some action, Lawrence enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman under the name John Hume, John Hume Ross, in August of 1922. But he was forced out in 1923 when his true identity was exposed. then he joined the Royal Tank Corps later that year and finally the RAF re-admitted him in August of 1925.

He would hold a few posts in India in the late 1920s before continuing to serve at several RAF bases and left at the end of his enlistment in March of 1935. During that time, his old friend King Faisal would oversee Iraq's independence in 1932 before he died the following year of a heart attack. In 1936, soon to be British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote of Lawrence.

He saw as clearly as anyone the vision of air power and all that it would mean in traffic and war. He felt that in living the life of a private in the Royal Air Force, he would dignify that honorable calling and helped to attract all that it's keenest in our youthful manhood to be to the sphere where it is most urgently needed. For this service and example, we owe him a separate debt. It was in itself a princely gift. Now, why did you write that? Well, because Lawrence had died.

on May 13th, 1935, Lawrence had been fatally injured in a motorcycle accident. On his brow superior SS100 near Dorset, just two months after leaving military service. A dip in the road obstructed his view of two boys on their bicycles. He swerved hard to avoid them, lost control, was thrown over the handlebars dying six days later at the age of only 46. It's fucking incredible he was even able to ride a motorcycle at that point in his life. He'd shrunk down to just 20 inches tall. 18 inches of that still had. No wonder he had a hard time

seeing the road ahead of him. And now let's get out of this timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. Thomas Edward Ned, T.E. Lawrence. If you knew of him at all, I bet you knew of him thanks to the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia,

directed by David Lean. A movie hailed is one of the greatest movies ever made. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winning seven. In 1998, the American Film Institute placed Lawrence of Arabia, fifth on their list of the greatest films ever made. In an updated list in 2007, still ranked seventh.

The British Film Institute named Lawrence of Arabia the third greatest British film ever made in 1999. In 2004, it was then voted the single best British film ever made in the Sunday Telegraphs poll of Britain's leading filmmakers. Stars Peter O'Toole is Lawrence, who is depicted on the poster like a cowboy, his shirt whip and open, his camel charging a head, holding a knife over his head.

But the movie, of course, took a lot of liberties They didn't tell the real Lawrence story For one thing, he did not come to the Middle East as a warrior He came as a mild-mannered academic With no intention of going into the military He was a shy guy interested in antiquity Who gradually became more interested in the people of the Middle East Their traditions, their politics, their culture

Once he did enter the military He did not kick a bunch of ass right out of the gate Took a while to become Lawrence of Arabia Instead, his good plans were frittered away Time and time again by the British government who were reluctant to upset their allies the French. Much of Lawrence's time in 1914 and 1915 was spent making maps rather than charging into battle. It was working with Faisal, capturing Akaba and driving towards Damascus at the war's end in 1918

where Lawrence found his true strength and leadership in immortalized his name, engaging in renegade attacks against the Turks that were less intended to overwhelm them and more intended to confuse them. He helped Faisal push the Ottoman army back and captured Damascus, seemingly paving the way for an independent Arab Syria as the British had promised. But that wouldn't happen. The wheels of colonialism kept turning and the area went over to the French, much to Lawrence's disgust. Today, T.E. Lawrence continues to be heralded as one of the most iconic figures of the early 20th century. Part of the enduring fascination with him has to do with the sheer improbability of Lawrence's tale of an unassuming,

young Britain, a small man, not as tiny as I made out, but he really was around 5'2, which was uncommon, very uncommon for soldiers at the time because you couldn't actually enter the military at that height. He found himself becoming a big champion of a downtrodden people thrust into events that would change the course of history. Or perhaps what we really should remember about him is his ability to change his mind. To go against the ways in which he was brought up and embraced different ways of thinking, different ways to see in the world,

to see people who were not like him and instead of backing up, move closer, to learn, to listen, to help. Now, should he have helped the Arabs? I personally struggle with that. King Faisal was relatively progressive compared to the Saudis, for sure. But even still, women would not gain the right to vote until 1980 in Iraq. Yes, 1980. But to be fair to Lawrence, when he was fighting, women didn't have the right to vote in England either. That wouldn't come until well after World War I, not until 1928. However, slavery was still legal in the area. We call Iraq now when Faisal took over. It's fucking crazy.

wouldn't be abolished until 1924, but it was abolished by Lawrence's friend, King Faisal. Did Lawrence know his heart and intentions? I'm not sure, but the whole situation has made me think a lot about the nature of colonialism, colonialism in this episode. Is foreign rule always a bad idea? Is it always terrible? Or if more humans will be able to have more rights

and live more authentic lives under a foreign ruler than a native one, is it more humane in certain instances? I don't know for sure if that was the case here, but in certain circumstances, I would definitely argue that it is sometimes more humane. Right? Let's say you have two nations. You live in nation A. Doesn't matter where it is or what it's called. In your nation, men and women have truly equal rights. People of all races have equal rights. People both straight and queer have equal rights. In Nation B, only white straight men can vote. Only white straight men can own land. Women not allowed to file for divorce or to change or, excuse me, charge their husbands with domestic violence.

it is illegal to be homosexual. Black and brown-skinned people are not allowed to practice certain professions, be in certain public places, et cetera, et cetera. You get the picture. And now there's an opportunity for Nation A to go to war with Nation B to subjugate them, to make them a colonial puppet state, to force them to modernize and give their people the same rights as the people with Nation A.

Are you okay with that? Would you want that? Or would you rather they continue to have the right to self-govern, as they wish, even if that self-governance comes at a continued human cost? a great cost to basic human rights for most of the country's people. I would want them to be, in that scenario, subjugated. I would want to impose my belief in what is a better way to live upon them. Does that make me an oppressor, a liberator, or both?

Time now for the takeaways. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Number one, Thomas Edward Lawrence, born in 1888, was an academic, an archaeologist, a mapmaker, a British intelligence officer, and a fierce warrior for the Arabs in a time when conventional British belief said it was impossible to be all of those things at the same time.

But Lawrence had never listened to what was possible. From his youngest years, he had set out to do the impossible, biking across France, walking across the Syrian desert, doing things most people would immediately say, fucking no way to. This would serve him well on a thousand-mile-long treks to cross the desert on camelback and help him win the respect of the Arab forces

he would eventually command when he became the link between Faisal, the leader of the Arab revolt and the British. Number two, the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe, ruled an area spanning from Turkey to the farthest reaches of the Middle East, with its territorial height coming in the 1600s. By the dawn of the 20th century, ineffective management, numerous lost wars and growing nationalism

meant the empire was breaking apart of the seams. This offered the possibility of an independent Arab state, an independent Jewish state, or European powers swooping in to claim the territories for their own empires. Number three, the Sykes-Piql Agreement was an infamous agreement between the British and French to divide up to Middle East, which would eventually take place in their mandate system. Before that, however, the British had promised Arab independence and an Arab state in the McMahon-Husain correspondence, and they promised Zionists a Jewish homeland in their Balfour Declaration. The losers of this were the Arabs, who put the full weight of their forces to back the British up only to be betrayed at the war's end. Number four, T.E. Lawrence fought bitterly for Arab independence until he was unable to do so.

Through his years, fighting for freedom for the Arab people, he became personally disgusted by the promises his own country was willing to make, promises they had no inclination of honoring. And this served the British government well, as long as Lawrence was fighting and they could ignore his overtures. But after the war, he was considered a persona non-grata by the British government and spent most of the rest of his life in the military before his death at 46. Number five, new info. Many people think that T.E. Lawrence may have been, probably was queer. For starters, he never publicly courted or dated anyone, never pursued a single woman romantically in his 46 years on earth, and he explicitly referenced being a virgin in some of his letters with his friends, despite not being overtly religious. Perhaps he was asexual. That's certainly possible.

Sex, not for everybody. But also, the dedication to his book, Seven Pillars, is a poem titled 2S.A. that opens with, I loved you. So I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky and stars to earn you freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,

that your eyes might be shining for me when we came. It's thought this was addressed to Dahum, his former assistant. While Lawrence himself denied any experience of sex in multiple private letters, he also lived at a time that heavily stigmatized and overtly criminalized homosexuality.

Also, contrary to the norms of the times, his writing on the subject of homosexuality was very tolerant. In Chapter 1 of the Seven Pillars, he writes, In horror of such sordid commerce, diseased female prostitutes, our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies, a cold convenience that, by comparison, seems sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify the sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs

and supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual coefficient of the mental passion, which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort to secure Arab independence. He also wrote, in a letter to Charlotte Shaw, I've seen lots of man and man loves. Very lovely and fortunate, some of them were. There's also evidence that he was a masochist. Aside from his endurance test as a young man in later life, Lawrence literally paid a military a colleague to administer beatings to him. Was the real reason for that to test his courage? Or did he get off on that? No king shaming, just curious. Do we need to remake Lawrence of Arabia and showcase a guy who not only whooped a lot of ass in battle, but also liked to get his

ass whooped in the bedroom? I don't know. I say we do it. It'll be fun to watch certain people's heads explode. Hail Lusufina. Time shock. Top five takeaways. The real Lawrence of Arabia has been sucked. My God. You know what? If you're upset with my pronunciations on that one, I can truly say that's the fucking best I can do.

God damn it, that was a fucking hard episode to record. Jesus Christ. Ooh. Information so much easier to read than recite. Jesus. That motherfucker went to every fucking town in the Middle East, apparently. I was like, oh, cool. Another one?

Oh, good. Another place I've never fucking hurts that out loud. Awesome. The thousandsth one? Cool. Great. But fascinating. Fascinating subject matter.

I hope I didn't fucking ruin it. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all their help of making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode and design merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thank you to Sophie Evans for some awesome initial research. But I also felt like I should have punished her by making her fucking read this episode. Sure, Sophie. Yeah, you can write all this.

but can you say it? She probably can't actually. She's much stronger speaker pronunciation wise than me. Also, thanks to the all seen eyes moderating the cult of curious private Facebook page. Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth, everybody over on the Time Sucks subreddit

and Bad Magic subreddit. And now, for this week's Time Sucker Updates. Add your Time Sucker updates. First up is a message that just cracked me up because it has so very little to do with its subject line. An anonymous and horny, good for them, space lizard and sucker, sent in a message to Bojangles at timesuckpodcast.com with the subject line of Hog Trail Killer Update.

But then this is what they wrote. Hello, once again, Suckmaster, Queen of Bad Magic, and everybody else who makes Timesug possible. Hail Nimrod, hail the Time Suck and Bad Magic crew, and especially Hail Lucifina with this update. There is your warning that this one is going to be filthy. Incubus himself would be proud of me, or so this kinky meat sack hopes.

But I'm a huge experimentalist and have done many, many things. So if this gets read, please keep my name out of this. I think I said anonymous, didn't I? Okay, good. Your name is out. But here are just a few of the many wonderful things I've experienced as an experimentalist. I've had nipple clamps on for over a total of 200 hours at this point. I spend a majority of my time tied up by my partner,

as well as with a big old bright red ball gag between my lips, and that's still nothing compared to evil kink demon and not in the good way, Daniel Conahan. As soon as I got to the first victim, I was like, oh, God, good thing my kinky partner would never do that to me. But he's also slowly becoming a time sucker, and he'd be mortified if he realized it's me writing this. But just last Thursday, my weekend, I spent a few hours tied to his bed, spread eagle blindfolded gag and just waiting. I'm not a very patient person, especially when I'm bottoming, and he can afford to wait. He likes to see me squirm in the best of ways. and, well, let's say it hurts to sit for a while because I wasn't being, in Incubis voice,

good kitten for Incubus. But holy shit, can that man force me to submission? Maybe Lindsay can learn a lesson from him in submission. Is that joke okay in this context? Oh, it sure is. But I digress. Fellow meet Saxon spaces with kink can be very fun and nothing to be ashamed of, unless you like to be ashamed, like the filthy and horny creatures you are.

As long as you follow some rules, my biggest is consent and safe words. which is, even though it is hard to say Megatron while wearing a four-inch ball gag in your mouth. Don't ask me how I know, just trust me on this. But anyways, keep doing this sometimes. Extremely dirty job. Keep praising the goodest boy, Bojangles. Keep praising Lucifina.

I actually said, hell Lucifina, to the best of my ability while ball gagged, wearing nipple clamps and handcuffed to the headboard, while he had his hands both somewhere on and inside me. and keep on doing the best of sucking that your mush mouth and mush tongue can do. It was fucking rough today. You heard it. I know Lindsay surely appreciates it, or at least I hope she does.

You know I try my best. Yours, Anonymous, Kinky Meetsack and Space Lizard, who has found their equally experimental partner, which might I add is slowly beginning to swallow all the sucking I'm having him do with time suck, you pervert. Get your mind out of the gutter. Three and a half stars, blah, blah, blah. In all seriousness, no, keep being yourself and Hill Nimrod. on the off chances gets red.

Please keep me anonymous. Exo, XO, XO, Anonymous, Kinky, possibly Freaky Sucker, who likes a taste of their partner's sweaty, dirty socks. Oh, I needed that. Oh, God. That was fucking great. That just made up for the fucking mental strain. Trying to keep this episode on the tracks.

Oh, God, anonymous sucker. Thanks for that message. I was pretty tired when I was compiling your messages for this one. And this woke me up. I had fucking tears in my eyes. I'm laughing so hard. And not laughing at the kink. Not laughing at that.

Not shaming anything. I was just laughing. I just kept waiting for more information on the Hog Trail Killer episode. And I just kept getting more intense sexual information. Also, you know what? I'm jealous. My now 20-year-old son, Kyler, has been home from college for a few months,

which has been awesome. We've gotten a lot of bonding time. But also, sex life has taken a hit. Walls are too thin in our house. His bedroom is too close for us to really go at it. So good on you and your partner for having, Jesus Christ, so much fun. You know what? Do it while you can. I can almost feel the giddiness and satisfaction in your message.

Incubis is proud of you. You beautiful, horny, silly goose. Keep having fun. And to reference the hog truck killer, don't get tied to a tree in the woods with a rope around your neck and no one to hear you if you scream. Yay, kink, but let's be safe. Let's please be safe.

and now I have another silly message. Maybe not that silly, but it's good. Mostly made of poop sack. So Sia Holden sent in a message with the subject line of, yes, ass wipe, I believed you. Wow. Aggressive. So Sia, what's up with a name calling?

Then Zosai wrote, Goddam, but Dan, yes, I bought the entire lupus poopas bit, and I have fibromyalgia. I'm in that whole health sphere of the internet constantly, so I should know better. You can blame it on the special anti-inflammatory. bread I'm baking during the episode, but we all know the true culprit is fibro fog, that crusty layer of what the fuck that forms over my brain when I have been too achy for too long, which is

obviously caused by my body being 70% poop. Love you, bro. Zosia, sound it out. Let's see how you do. Zosia, I love you too. I hope you're feeling better. I'm sorry you're mostly made of poop. I mean, God, no wonder you're achy. Also, special anti-inflammatory bread? I'm intrigued. I haven't eaten normal bread in over six weeks now. I didn't realize how much less my joints would ache, cutting out sugar. But also, I don't want to live on this fucking really restricted diet forever. I won't. Share your bread magic with me,

please. I hope the bread was made with the most delicious, soft on the inside, but also fluffy and also crunchy, but not too hard on the outside that it cuts the roof of your mouth. I hope you ate some when it was fresh out of the oven and slathered with real butter with those little chunks of salt in it.

Sounds so good right now. All right, this week's last message. comes in from power sibling duo Kali and Colton Hardy. Send him with the subject line of Big Husker NCAA wrestling sendoff for the sweetest boy alive. To the master sucker himself, the sultan of the suckhole, and the only man I trust to navigate the dark corners of the history without losing his mind, Dan Cummins. First things first.

Hail Nimrod. Hail Lusufina, praise Bojangles, and may Triple M keep high notes ever pitchy. I'm riding in to ask for a massive, bad magic side, good luck for my incredibly talented, occasionally annoying but genuinely impressive little brother Brock Hardy. Dan, it's his senior year at the University of Nebraska, and his career has been a wilder ride than a deep dive into the lizard Illuminati. This kid is a three-time All-American, a 2025 Big Ten champ, a U-23 World Championship bronze medalist.

He has gone from a chubby-cheeked toddler who used to finish the sentence, Brock, you are with the sweetest boy alive, to a total beast on the mat, and he isn't even a cocky dick about it. But as the pressure mounts for his final month at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I want to point out what actually matters. In a sport as brutal as wrestling,

it's easy to get bitter, but Brock treats every setback and loss as a lesson. He uses everything thrown at him as fuel for growth, never wasted a moment of struggle. He uses his faith as a quiet compass to be compassionate and open-minded to all struggles people around him face. He proves the discipline found on the mat,

translates into being a better human off of it. He is a constant reminder that class, hard work, and respect are far more valuable than any trophy. I am so incredibly proud to be his sister, even if he does make mean our older brother, who started us on Timesaw years ago, feel guilty for wanting to be mean to these small-risted in-cells who troll wrestling forums.

Sorry, Brock, some people need a verbal suplex. Dan, thanks for keeping Brock and me entertained for the countless hours. We've spent driving across the vast openness between Utah and Nebraska. You have one more big tournament to let the light shine. I know I know, corny, and have some fucking fun doing what you love. Wrestling is fun.

Let's fucking go. Keep on sucking. Haley and Colton, proud siblings and dedicated meat sacks. P.S. signing off with the rhymes that our mom used for us as babies, which feels a lot funnier now that we're adults. Little, little, little girl with a big, big, big girl temper. That's Haley. And Cuba do, who do, the biggest.

little boo-boo, little teeny woo-woo. Ha ha! That's Colton. God, Hale, you are so sweet. What an awesome sister. And thank you, Colton, for turning your siblings onto the suck and Brock. Man, I checked out some of your highlights on YouTube because of your sister's message, and man, you're so good, dude.

Wildly impressive. I outweigh Brock by literally 100 pounds. He would fucking destroy me. He would absolutely manhandle me and probably not break a sweat. I'd be light work. for a guy with an excellent name for a wrestler, by the way. Love seeing siblings support one another.

It's so special. Don't ever let that go because you guys do have something special that you cannot replicate for obvious reasons with anybody else. Crush that last big college tournament, Brock. Leave it all out on the mat. Thanks for entertaining so many people

by putting on such an incredible performance every time you take the mat. Keep being a beast and keep being the sweetest little boy alive. Hail Nimrod and hail to the Hardy clan. Time suckers, I needed that. We all did. Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast.

Be sure and rate and review TimeSuck if you haven't already. Please don't head to Saudi Arabia this week. Trying to ride around the desert on a camel with a small group of resistance fighters to be part of some revolt, especially if you're only one or two feet tall. I like where your heart's at, but I don't like your odds. Military tech has evolved a lot. You're going to need more firepower than that to have a chance today.

Just stay home and stay safe and keep on sucking. and magic productions. All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night and the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible. This I did. T. E. Lawrence. A powerful quote from the introductory chapter of his 1926 book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

And also, just one more time today, just so it stays with you.