Lawrence can't have NOT known of the terrible fate of British and Indian troops not that far from him at the time.
In 1916, Turks captured the British-Indian army at Kut and marched the 12,000 PoW's thousands of miles to their imprisonment, in awful conditions.
I read 'The Psychology of Military Incompetence'. The long march there was arguably worse - stragglers died or were murdered, even possibly raped and beaten if they fell out of line of march.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kut
From the book above-
"After 147 days, Townshend’s food supplies, which he had originally stated would only last
a month, ran out. Confident from his exchange with the Turkish commander
that he would be treated generously, he capitulated on April 19th, 1916, and
handed his weak and starving men over to the not so tender mercy of the
Turks. Then it was their paths diverged. While he was transported in the
greatest comfort to Baghdad and thence to Constantinople, his 13,000 men
began their 1,200-mile march across the arid wastes and freezing heights of
Asia Minor. And while he was wined and dined, honoured and entertained
as the personal guest of the Turkish commander-in-chief, his men died in
their thousands of starvation, dysentery, cholera and typhus, and from the
whips of their bad-tempered Kurdistan guards. They died of the heat by day
and of the cold by night. They died because they wearied of staying alive –
dropping out of the column, to be set upon by marauding Arabs who,
having robbed them, filled their mouths with sand and stones. In all,
seventy per cent of the British and fifty per cent of the Indian troops
perished in captivity."
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