condemned to repeat....
-- T.E. Lawrence ('>
"[We] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. [We] have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information....Our unfortunate troops...under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad."
The original quotation:
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster... Our unfortunate troops, British and Indian, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.
-- T. E. Lawrence, "A Report on Mesopotamia," Sunday Times (London), August 22, 1920.
(And if you're tired of visualizing Peter O'Toole, I found a photo from the T. E. Lawrence Centenary Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 1988-9.)
"[We] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. [We] have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information....Our unfortunate troops...under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad."
The original quotation:
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster... Our unfortunate troops, British and Indian, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.
-- T. E. Lawrence, "A Report on Mesopotamia," Sunday Times (London), August 22, 1920.
(And if you're tired of visualizing Peter O'Toole, I found a photo from the T. E. Lawrence Centenary Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 1988-9.)
