Textual differences between
the subscribers' edition and
the first trade edition

Only a few changes were made in the text when Cape printed the first trade edition. As A W Lawrence stated in his Preface to the 1935 production, certain omissions were thought necessary 'to save hurting the feelings of persons still living' at that time. Gaps of the same length were left in the text, and it was not until the reprint of 1973 that the cuts were restored. Those words omitted from the first trade edition are underlined:

[sub ed p 37, tr ed p 61] [relating to Sir Archibald Murray, the General in Egypt] -

'He was a very nervous mind, fanciful and essentially competitive. When confronted with what he considered a rival show, he bent his considerable powers to crab it.

He found help in his Chief of Staff, General Lynden Bell, a red soldier, with an instinctive shuddering away from politicians, and a conscientiously assumed heartiness. His military conception of the loyalties of his office involved him in a chameleon-like attempt to imitate the frailties as well as the virtues of his Chief. Two of the General staff officers followed their leaders full cry; and so the unfortunate McMahon found himself deprived of Army help and reduced to waging his war in Arabia with the assistance of his Foreign Office Attach�s. Even these proved not all quite loyal to him.'

[sub ed p 38, tr ed p 62] - 'whose boots the Grahams were not good enough to clean.'

[sub ed p 303, tr ed p 321] - 'Meanwhile I heard of Allenby's excellence, and of the last tragedy of Murray, that second attack on Gaza, which London forced on one too weak or too politic to resist; and how we went into it, everybody, generals and staff-officers, even soldiers, convinced that we should lose; while Murray, in headquarters, worked for a perfectly safe defeat, costing enough men to prove he had tried, but not enough to be disastrous. Five thousand eight hundred was the casualty bill. They said Allenby was getting armies of fresh men, and hundreds of guns, and all would be different.'

A W Lawrence further notes in his Preface that a few other minor amendments were made -

[sub ed p 274, line 9; tr ed p 293, line 4] - 'with halts to breath only' - 'breath' changed to 'breathe' in the trade edition in agreement with the corresponding passage in the Oxford-printed text - 'we let the camels breathe a little'.

[sub ed p 371, line 15; tr ed p 389, line 10] - 'The Humber made us canvas straps' - 'Humber' is italicised in the trade edition to make the sense clearer, for in the subscribers' edition the names of some other ships were similarly italicised.

There was also the problem of the spelling of Arabic names, which varies greatly throughout the book. Only three vowels are recognised in Arabic, while some of the consonants have no English equivalent, and Lawrence took great pleasure in making the most of those inconsistencies which arose from the fact that not only could the sound of many Arabic words thus be legitimately represented in English in a variety of ways - most of which he went to great pains to employ! - but where any place name had not already become fixed by literary use or other fame, even the natives of the district would differ in its pronunciation. As Lawrence wrote in the paragraph which precedes the table of dates and movements [sub ed p 657, tr ed p 664], 'Arabic names are spelt anyhow, to prevent my appearing an adherent of one of the existing "system of transliteration"', and a classic example of Lawrence's blithe caprice appears on p 68, where 'Feisal' is referred to in the text, but becomes 'Feisul' in an adjacent margin heading. Similar examples abound, and Lawrence's delight in refusing to attempt any uniformity in this respect is strangely contrasted by the extraordinary effort he expended in forcing his own rules of conformity on the rest of the text. To his eternal credit, A W Lawrence declined to impose order where chaos was intended, and left his brother to his infinite variety.

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