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As a part of his early reading he made an exhaustive study of military writers, from the wars of Sennacherib, Thotmes, and Rameses down to Napoleon, Wellington, Stonewall Jackson, and von Moltke. But this he did voluntarily and not as a part of any required work. Among his favorite books was Marshal Foch’s “Principes de Guerre”; but he remarked to me on one occasion in Arabia that his study of Cæsar and Xenophon had been of more value to him in his desert campaign, because in the irregular war which he conducted against the Turks he found it necessary to adopt tactics directly opposed to those advocated by the great French strategist.

As the subject for his Oxford thesis Lawrence chose the military architecture of the Crusades, and so absorbed did he become in this work that he urged his parents to allow him to visit the Near East, so that he might gain first-hand knowledge of the architectural efforts of the early knights of Christendom. In this he was encouraged by the distinguished Oxford scholar and authority on Arabia, Dr. David George Hogarth, curator of the Ashmolean Museum, a man who has had an important influence over his entire life down to the present day, and who even came out to Egypt during the war and acted as his intimate counselor during the Arabian campaign. Lawrence’s mother was reluctant to have him leave home but, after many weeks of pleading, gave her consent to his visiting Syria as a Cook’s tourist and allowed him two hundred pounds for the trip. His family was certain that he would return home after a few weeks, satisfied to settle down for the rest of his days and ready to forget the heat, the smells, and the inconveniences of life in the Orient. But on reaching the Near East he scorned tourists’ comforts and the beaten track. He entered Syria at Beyrouth and, shortly after landing, adopted native costume and set out barefoot for the interior. Instead of traveling as a tourist, he wandered off alone, along the fringe of the Great Arabian Desert, and amused himself studying the manners and customs of the mosaic of peoples who dwell in the ancient corridor between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. Two years later, when he finally returned to Oxford to hand in his thesis and receive his degree, he still had one hundred pounds left!