Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

Despite the flowery beginning, McMahon’s first message poured cold water on the projected borders of “Arab lands,” as defined by the nationalist groups in Damascus and by the sharif of Mecca. Stripped of its polite decoration, his reply was that discussion of the precise borders of an Arab state would have to wait until after victory. The sharif’s reply to this, in September, took the form of a fairly sharp rebuke, though even an admirer of his, the pro-Arab historian George Antonius, remarks that it “was a mode of expression in which his native directness was enveloped in a tight network of parentheses, incidentals, allusions, saws and apothegms, woven together by a process of literary orchestration into a sonorous rigmarole.” It was not sufficiently florid, however, to conceal the sharif’s irritation at what he describes as McMahon’s “lukewarmth and hesitancy,” which was reinforced by the arrival in Cairo of an Arab officer, Muhammad Sharif al-Faruqi, a Baghdadi, who had crossed over to the British lines at great risk to convey the fact that the sharif’s demands were essentially the same as those of the Arab nationalist groups, and not by any means those of the sharif alone.

After consulting London and his own experts, chief among them Storrs, McMahon replied on October 24 with a letter that was intended to start the immemorial Oriental process of bargaining, setting out Britain’s offer in response to the sharif’s overambitious asking price. McMahon consented this time to give Great Britain’s pledge to the independence of the Arabs within the area outlined in the sharif’s letter, but with certain important exclusions. These included the Arabs’ recognition of Britain’s “special interest” in Mesopotamia (oil); some form of joint Anglo-Arab administration for the vilayats (provinces) of Basra and Baghdad; and the exclusion of the areas to the west of Damascus, which were not “purely Arab,” in other words Lebanon, where the Druses regarded themselves as under the protection of the British and the Maronite Christians as under the protection of France. Further exclusions included—a rather broad sweep—those areas in which Great Britain was not “free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally France,” and those areas controlled by “treaties concluded by us and certain Arab Chiefs,” a polite reminder that ibn Saud and several of the sharif’s other rivals would not be included in Hussein’s Arab state. Nowhere in the letter is Palestine mentioned, unless it is meant to be included in McMahon’s guarantee that Britain would protect the holy places—by which he almost certainly meant the Muslim holy places, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. On the other hand, since Palestine was not “purely Arab"—two Jewish communities were living there, one devoutly Orthodox, the other defiantly Zionist—and was indubitably to the west of Damascus, he may have meant to exclude it, or he simply took it for granted that the Allies were unlikely not to seek some form of control over the Christian holy places after the war.

T. E. Lawrence, by Augustus John.

T. E. Lawrence, by Eric Kennington.

Hogarth, by Augustus John.

Clayton, by Eric Kennington

Ronald Storrs, by Eric Kennington.

Allenby, by James McBey.

Feisal, photograph by Harry Chase.

The rifle presented to Lawrence by Feisal. Note that Lawrence carved his initials, the date, and four notches in the stok

Feisal’s bodyguard and slave, by James McBey.

Sharif Hussein, photographed in Jidda.

Lawrence, photographed by Harry Chase at Aqaba, 1918.

Abdulla, by Eric Kennington.

Auda Abu Tayi, by Eric Kenningtc

T. E. Lawrence, by Harry Chase.

Poster for Lowell Thomas’s “travelogue,” this one probably for the Australian production. (Note the Australian soldier in the characteristic slouched hat, in the foreground. Note, too, that the future author of How to Win Friends and Influence People is still spelling his name “Carnagey.”)

Map of the partition of Syria and Iraq as devised in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, by Tom Wrigley.

Lawrence’s plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, prepared by him for the Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet, in October 1918.

Much bloodshed and strife might have been spared had Storrs and McMahon drafted the note of October 24 more precisely, but they were working under pressure from London. The Gallipoli expedition had all too clearly failed, the Turkish army was still within reach of the Suez Canal, and the invasion of Mesopotamia was going more slowly than expected, while on the western front losses were soaring for no gain in ground, and on the eastern front the Russian army was already showing signs of an impending collapse. If there is a chance that the Arabs can be drawn into the war, promise them whatever they want: this was essentially the message from London. After the war was won, such promises could always be renegotiated, or fine-tuned.*

The exchange of messages between the sharif and McMahon continued at a leisurely pace until January 1, 1916, with no major changes in the position of either side. Neither party was content with the agreement that had been reached: the Arabs were unsatisfied because they wanted Syria above all, with its seacoast, as well as Palestine and Mesopotamia; the British were unsatisfied because this protracted negotiation had so far produced only Hussein’s refusal to endorse the jihad, and because lurking behind McMahon and Hussein’s correspondence like a guilty secret in a marriage was the fact that it had not yet been communicated to the French. This was how things stood on May 24, 1916, when the Arab Revolt finally began.

Attempts to reach an amicable accord between Britain and France* over sharing the Arab-populated areas of the Ottoman Empire once Turkey was defeated had been going on since 1914, despite the fact that the Turks seemed by late 1915 to be winning their war, and despite whatever agreements were being made by the British separately with Arab nationalists and Sharif Hussein. The views of the British and French on the future of the Middle East were so divergent, and their distrust of each other’s ambitions in the area was so strong, that Kitchener and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey eventually shifted the whole issue to a committee headed by an experienced diplomat and civil servant, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, no doubt in the hope that the matter could be shelved until a victory of some sort was won against the Turks. Though neither Kitchener nor Grey said it, they might well have echoed Talleyrand’s famous instruction to his staff on taking charge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Surtout, messieurs, pas trop de zиle. Unfortunately, this was to underestimate French interest in the subject, as well as the zeal of one committee member, Sir Mark Sykes.† Tall, wealthy, charming, handsome, well connected, ambitious, a member of Parliament, a baronet, and a successful author, Sykes was the perfect example of a supremely energetic and self-confident man placed where a cautious, slow-moving one would have been a better choice.

The sixth baronet, Sykes was both “a Yorkshire grandee,” who inherited a great house and 30,000 acres (as well as the fortune to support them), and a sophisticated world traveler from an early age. His mother was a Cavendish-Bentinck, one of a great and influential family at the head of which was the duke of Portland, and which by many strands was related to the royal family. Effervescent, imaginative, impulsive, and generous, Sykes was, among other things, a gifted caricaturist, whose cartoons of the great and famous are often hilarious, but never malicious or unkind. He was one of that rarest of creatures, an upper-class Englishman who was at home everywhere, and almost completely without racial or religious prejudice. He had a particular affinity for Turkey—he wrote two travel guides to Turkey, and a history of the Ottoman Empire—and also visited Mexico, Canada, the United States, Egypt, and India, and served in the Boer War, where he may first have attracted Kitchener’s attention. From the moment he took his seat in the House of Commons, he was recognized as a young man who could “fill the House,” a witty and provocative speechmaker clearly destined for a political future full of glittering prizes. He once held Ronald Storrs in thrall in Cairo by speaking into Storrs’s office Dictaphone “a twenty-minute Parliamentary Debate … with the matter as well as the manner of such different speakers as Lloyd George, F. E. Smith, John Redmond or Sir Edward Carson rendered with startling accuracy,” as well as a parody of a Drury Lane melodrama, complete with music and sound effects.

Everybody liked and admired Sykes; he was the life of the party wherever he went. Indeed his only defect, like that of his friend Winston Churchill, was that while he enjoyed a good argument he always came away from one under the impression that he had won it and that he had converted the other person to his point of view. Kitchener sent Sykes, now a lieutenant-colonel of the Green Howards, out to the Middle East in the summer of 1915 on what would today be called a fact-finding tour. Hecharmed everyone he met, even the French, since he was “a devout Roman Catholic and a Francophile,” and spoke perfect French. He traveled on to India, via Aden, where he had less success with Lord Hardinge, the viceroy. The government of India vigorously contested both the idea of the Arab Revolt and any promise to the Arabs of a future state. The government of India saw no signs in Basra that the Arabs wanted or would know what to do with self-government, and they proposed to run Mesopotamia as an extension of colonial rule in India. In the same spirit, they were backing ibn Saud with arms, support, and money, which, since he was the mortal rival of Sharif Hussein, put Delhi and London at loggerheads.

Sykes does not seem to have been deeply troubled by any of this—he was a man who could hold several passionate enthusiasms in his head at the same time without apparently noticing that they were contradictory. He was at once sincerely in favor of an Arab state and a wholly committed supporter of Zionism;* he was determined to give the French what they wanted, and at the same time in favor of McMahon’s correspondence with Sharif Hussein. He was sympathetic toward both Turks and Arabs, as well as Armenians and Kurds. If Sykes was aware that the one point most Arabs agreed on, whatever their other differences, was that the heart of any viable Arab state must be Syria, and that under no circumstances would they accept French domination, given France’s colonial record in North Africa, he managed to suppress this when he finally returned to London to report on his mission. It is typical of Sykes that he not only helped form the sentiment behind, and draft the language of the Balfour Declaration, but also designed the flag of the Arab Revolt, “a combination of green, red, black and white.” (Variations of this design would become the national flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.) Sykes is an example of a fatal British ability to see both sides of a dispute in an area of the world where there are only absolutes.

It should not be supposed, however, that Sykes was a British Pangloss, who believed Tout est pour le mieux, dans les meilleurs des mondes possibles. Sykes had a good, if shallow, understanding of what was happening in the Middle East, but not of the complexity of interests involved. Lawrence, who liked him, would nevertheless describe him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom as “a bundle of prejudices, intuitions and half-sciences,” and it was certainly true that Sykes was someone who leaped to the conclusion that he had understood a problem before the other person had even finished explaining it. He was, however, no fool; he brought back from his long journey, among other ideas, the perfectly correct conclusion that it was fatal to British interests in Arabia to have intelligence on that area split between so many competing departments. In Egypt, military intelligence reported to General Maxwell, the commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and civilian intelligence reported to Storrs and McMahon. In Basra, military intelligence reported to the commander in chief of the Indian army in Delhi, and civilian intelligence to the viceroy in Delhi. In addition, Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar, had his own intelligence service in Khartoum. Sykes had the sensible idea of uniting all these services into a single “Arabian Bureau,” in Cairo, of which he hoped to be named the chief.

In this Sykes was to be disappointed—the Arab Bureau, when it was formed, would come under Clayton, would have as its chief Lawrence’s old mentor Hogarth, and would include both Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, while Sykes was sidelined for the moment to deal with the numerous complaints and problems of the French on behalf of the war cabinet, though he would remain a constant presence, in person or by cable, in Middle Eastern affairs. Of Sykes it may truly be said, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, “There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it, but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong…. His watchword is always duty, and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost.”

Sykes’s return to London coincided most unfortunately with the decline in prestige of his patron, Kitchener. Among the civilian membersof the war cabinet, the failure at Gallipoli and the stalemate on the western front were beginning to erode faith in Kitchener’s infallibility. His reputation and his popularity with the general public made it impossible to get rid of him, but in the war cabinet he found himself increasingly isolated, and in the position of “the god that failed.” Kitchener responded by increasing the length of his periods of silence, with the result that it was Sykes himself who was given the opportunity to present “every aspect of the Arab question” to the War Committee of the cabinet. He did this brilliantly—nobody was better at putting on a “bravura” performance than Sykes, unless it was Lawrence. In the eyes of many, Sykes became almost overnight the expert on the Arab question in London—after all, he had been in the Middle East and had met everyone concerned—despite the fact that many of his ideas were eccentric or failed to represent the experience of those on the spot, like Clayton, Hogarth, and Lawrence. A happy, wealthy, and contented man—he had among other things a large family of his own—Sykes was almost constitutionally unequipped to convey the stubborn refusal to compromise, the fierce dogmatism, or the ancient and ineradicable hatreds of the Middle East to an audience of British political figures. In Sykes’s tour d’horizon the lion would lie down with the lamb: the views of Cairo, Khartoum, and Delhi would be reconciled; the ambitions of the French and the sharif of Mecca would both be met; and Britain would gain oil from Mesopotamia and control over Palestine to protect the Suez Canal.

Not surprisingly Sykes seemed to everybody just the right man to straighten things out with the French, so less than a week after his report to the War Committee, he was invited to attend a meeting of the “Nicolson Committee,” a group of Foreign Office civil servants under the chairmanship of Sir Arthur Nicolson,* which had been attempting to thrash out the details of what the French actually wanted, or at least might be persuaded to accept. Sykes’s presence, his charm, his sense of humor, and his knowledge of the Middle East, it was hoped, might reduce the acrimony

To say that the Christmas spirit was lacking in these discussions would be putting it mildly. Although it would be only two months before the Germans launched the Battle of Verdun in an attempt to bleed the French army to death (the battle would last nine months and cost the French nearly 400,000 casualties), the French were already impatient with their British ally, which, they thought, was not pulling its weight in the war; and they were as well deeply distrustful of British policy. Picot was a master of detail and a determined negotiator, and virtually the product of French colonial ambitions. His father was a founding member of the Comitй de l’Afrique Franзaise, and his brother the treasurer of the Comitй de l’Asie Franзaise, both well-financed right-wing organizations with solid bourgeois support for the promotion of French colonialism. Picot himself had a deep, instinctive belief not only in France’s mission civilisatrice, but in its imperative need to emerge from the war with a substantial gain in overseas territory as some compensation for the enormous sacrifices it was making. Quite apart from that, Picot, like many of the French, had an almost mystical belief in France’s deep historical connections to Lebanon and Syria, going back nearly 1,000 years to the Crusades and continuing through Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt. Syria and Lebanon were referred to as La France du Moyen-Orient, and in Paris it was widely assumed that the indigenous inhabitants of “France of the Middle East” were eagerly awaiting the imposition of French culture, laws, prosperity, and commerce. For a number of reasons rooted in the history of the Crusades, it was also assumed that “Syria” included not only Lebanon—You only had to look at the map, voyons, to see that Lebanon was nothing more than the Mediterranean coastline of Syria!—but Palestine. Had not Godefroy de Bouillon, after all, conquered Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, creating a state where 100,000 French-speaking soldiers ruled over 400,000 Muslims and Jews? Had not the French built, during the next few centuries, the magnificent castles that Lawrence had been at such pains to study and photograph in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine? The past spoke for itself, so far as the French were concerned—the French had led the way, and had paid for this land in blood and gold! Were their rights to be contested now by Arab nomads and sheepherders, or by the British, who had not arrived in force in this part of the world until the late nineteenth century?

Few people could have been found less well equipped to resist such arguments than Sir Mark Sykes, who had a genuine love for France, and whose strong point in any case was imagination and a concern for what we would now call the big picture. He did not, alas, have a head for details, or any willingness to argue about the meaning of every word in a text, let alone insignificant geographic features on a map. These, however, were Picot’s strengths. He was tireless and well-informed; his mind was made up; and he had been sent to the negotiating table with strict, precise instructions from his government with which he was in wholehearted agreement—unlike Sykes, whose mission was merely to smooth things over with the French, and, if possible, slow them down.

“The Sykes-Picot Agreement is a shocking document … the product of greed at its worst, that is to say, of greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity: it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing … [a] breach of faith.” If even so moderate a pro-Arab historian as George Antonius, writing from New York, in 1938, only three years after Lawrence’s death, can so describe the Sykes-Picot agreement, it can scarcely be wondered that Arab historians of the period today regard it as a betrayal equaled only by the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1947–1948. Few diplomatic documents in history have attracted such odium over so many decades. It now stands for most of the things Arabs resent about the Middle East as the region has evolved since 1918: the unnatural division of the Arabic-speaking area of the Ottoman Empire into relatively small states, with frontiers drawn carelessly (or sometimes cunningly) by western powers; the unequal distribution of natural wealth, including water and later oil; the opening up of Palestineto Jewish settlement (under the protection of the British flag); the imposition of royalty а l’anglaise on people who wanted democracy;* and much else besides.

It must be remembered, however, that when Sykes sat down with Picot the much-delayed revolt of the Arabs against the Turks had yet to begin, and there was still a good deal of doubt among the British that it ever would—or that it would amount to anything much if it did. A British army had been defeated by the Turks at Gallipoli; another British army was about to be surrounded by the Turks at Kut al-Amara; the French army was about to endure the martyrdom of Verdun, followed shortly afterward by the martyrdom of the British Expeditionary Force in the First Battle of the Somme. The possibility of persuading the sharif of Mecca to declare a revolt against the Turks and raise a few thousand ragged, if picturesque, Bedouin tribesmen to take Medina, if they could, was not foremost on the minds of those in power in London and Paris.

In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin raises the possibility that Sykes and Clayton misunderstood each other, or that Clayton may even have attempted to deceive Sykes. This is not improbable. Clayton, after all, was a professional soldier and intelligence officer, as well as the homme de confiance of Sir Reginald Wingate in Cairo. He would certainly have been cautious in speaking to a wealthy and influential member of Parliament touring the Middle East on behalf of the government, even one who came dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant-colonel of the Green Howards. In fact, what really mattered was not the difference between Clayton’s view of a future Arab state (that is, the view from Cairo and Khartoum) and Sykes’s (that is, the view from London and Paris) but rather the assumptions they shared. For both of them, an Arab state, whatever its borders, would require an Arab king—a role for which they considered the sharif of Mecca admirably suited, since he was by any standards animposing figure and a gentleman. They saw the Arab state, in other words, as resembling one of the larger principalities in India, with a British adviser hovering in the background among the gorgeous figures of the court; or as a clone of Egypt, with a British high commissioner pulling the strings behind a facade of “native” government. One reason why Sykes managed to make such rapid progress with the normally difficult Georges-Picot was that Picot’s view of French Syria was very similar. He had in mind a native ruler very much like the one who was then sultan of Morocco, kept in power by a native army led by French officers, and kept in line by a French high commissioner who took his orders from Paris. That this was not the independent state the sharif, his sons, the Bedouin tribesmen, or the intellectuals and Arab nationalists in Damascus were expecting to get did not deter either of them.

Even Lawrence, who would do his best in 1918 “to biff the French out of Syria,” did not at the time envisage a single Arab state like the one to which Sir Henry McMahon and the sharif had agreed in their correspondence. In any case, every British plan for the future of the Middle East bore within the text two escape clauses: the first was that the Arabs would have to fight the Turks and make a significant contribution to the Allies’ victory; the second was that any agreement made by the British would be (in McMahon’s words) “without detriment” to French claims, whatever these might be. The first had not yet happened, and the second was exactly what Sykes and Picot were trying to put down on paper.

What they came up with was very much like the famous description of a camel as a horse designed by a committee. The French received as a direct colonial possession the so-called Blue Area, including Lebanon, the port of Alexandretta, and a large chunk of what is now Syria and southern Turkey; the British received the Red Area, consisting of a good deal of what is now Iraq, from Basra to Baghdad; the A Area, consisting of what is now modern Syria and a large part of Iraq, would be reserved for a French-controlled Arab state; the B Area, consisting roughly of modern Jordan and southwestern Iraq, would be reserved for a British-controlled Arab state. Palestine would be shared by the French and British.

Even a glance at the map will show that the areas for the Arab states consisted basically of the leftovers, without ports on the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf. As envisioned, the Arab states had no natural geographic boundaries; nor did they have any control over the great rivers or over the oil fields in Mesopotamia. The Middle East was carved up like a carcass by a careless butcher, with the Arabs being thrown the parts that nobody wanted to eat. By design, the Arab states, if they ever came to exist, would be isolated and separated; and by lack of foresight, the vast area to the south (what is now Saudi Arabia) was excluded from the map. Ibn Saud was at the time one of half a dozen ferocious rival warrior chieftains in the great desert; his capital at Riyadh was virtually unreachable. He kept the golden sovereigns he received from the government of India to prevent him from attacking the coastal sheikhdoms on the Persian Gulf, as well as the gold coins he received from the Turks to stop him from raiding Turkish outposts, locked in a wooden strongbox, bound in iron, in his tent, under the guard of his slaves. The idea that he might shortly emerge as the ruler over the world’s richest supply of oil had not yet occurred to anyone, least of all himself. The wide swath of French influence, stretching from the Mediterranean to Mosul and the Persian Gulf, was due to the concern of the British about Russia—they assumed correctly that Russia would have to be cut in on the deal, and wanted the French to provide a buffer zone separating Russia from the areas to the south that protected the approaches to the west bank of the Suez Canal. It was hoped that a French zone would prevent any future attempt on the part of the Russians to march south and seize the canal, or would at least bring the French into the fight against them. Far from Picot’s having cleverly squeezed Mosul and its oil fields out of a reluctant Sykes, Sykes had instead forced it on Picot.

It is a measure of the British government’s relief that Sykes and Picot had achieved an agreement of any kind that the document was approved swiftly and without any particular difficulty, and Sykes was sent off to join Picot in Petrograd and secure the approval of the Russians. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Dmitriyevich Sazonov, showed very littleinterest in the division of Arab-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire, but insisted that Russia must have possession of Constantinople; must participate in the administration of Palestine, where there were ancient and important Russian Orthodox monasteries and privileges; and must receive a large chunk of the Turkish areas in the Caucasus. It seems to have been Sazonov who gave Sykes the notion that the Zionists might have something to say about Palestine, though since the czar was fiercely anti-Semitic, Sazonov may have been warning against this rather than recommending it. In any event the idea was to germinate in Sykes’s mind—he was always, as Lawrence described him, “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements.” The notion was coupled with Sykes’s sympathy for the underdog and his freedom from racial prejudice, and he soon encouraged a new and hitherto unexpected British intervention into the division of the Turkish empire, which would reemerge in the form of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

A dawning concern that the Sykes-Picot agreement might not meet with approval outside France, Britain, and Russia led to the decision not to show it to Sir Henry McMahon for his comments before it was approved on January 5, 1916, or even afterward. It was placed in the Pandora’s box of the Allies’ secret agreements, and would not emerge until after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when Lenin and Trotsky decided to publish in Izvestia and Pravda all the secret treaties to which the czarist government had been a party. Lawrence would claim in 1918, in Damascus, that he knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot agreement, but that is certainly untrue. Clayton knew about it, and the intelligence services Clayton headed in Cairo were run more in the spirit of an Oxford Senior Common Room than a secret government department. Keeping the actual text of the agreement from Cairo was elementary prudence, preserving what would now be called deniability—it would of course be easier for all those in Cairo to deny that they knew the contents if they hadn’t seen it. Nor was Mark Sykes much good at keeping secrets—particularly when he thought he had brought off a diplomatic coup. Besides, Lawrencewould later claim to have briefed Feisal on its contents. The truth seems to be that the general terms of the agreement were common knowledge by then. Those among the British who disagreed with it consoled themselves with the thought that it would be renegotiated, modified, or ignored once the Allies sat down to discuss the peace; but this consolation failed to take into account that the French, in their irritating, precise way, regarded every word of it as binding.

Lawrence’s own view of the matter varied according to his mood. He did not take Sykes altogether seriously, and on the subjects of the Middle East and the Arabs’ future he was inclined to regard Sykes as a lightweight. When he was exhausted by the physical and psychological stress of warfare in the desert, or by the endless difficulties of keeping the Bedouin together, he tormented himself on the subject, as in his note to Clayton from Wadi Sirhan: “I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way…. We are calling on them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.” Of course Lawrence had a gift for self-dramatization, together with a need for self-punishment, but there is no doubt that this cri de coeur was genuine and would form the basis for many of the major decisions he made about his life after the war’s end. No child of Sarah’s could be free from a deep sense of guilt and personal responsibility, or forgive himself for obeying an order to lie about what he knew to be true. No matter how much he wanted to break free from her fierce religious beliefs, Lawrence could not—they were implanted too deeply in him to eradicate.

In his lighter moments, when things were going well, he could console himself, like many of his colleagues, with the thought that something was better than nothing—the Arabs would get one or more states, and would be better off in any case than they were under Turkish domination and misrule—but even this compromise was complicated by his determination to get the Arabs what he had promised them despite the Sykes-Picot agreement. Lawrence knew about McMahon and Hussein’s correspondence, and noted a significant loophole in the Sykes-Picot agreement: it could be argued that if the Arabs themselves seized Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs before the Allied forces, they might keep these cities under some form of Arab suzerainty, despite the French claim on Syria.

It became the idйe fixe behind Lawrence’s strategy, a secret that he withheld from all the British civil and military authorities, who would instantly have discouraged him. He, personally, would get Feisal and the Arabs to Damascus before the British or the French, and declare an independent Arab Syria before he could be stopped. Once that was done, he thought, the French would have to back down in the face of public opinion in Britain and the United States. This was the straw he clutched at, throughout 1917 and 1918.

Lawrence was kept busy with his intelligence duties; this was probably just as well, for he was informed in October 1915 that his brother Will, whom he had just missed seeing, had been listed as missing and presumed killed only a week after reaching the western front as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps. Lawrence wrote to his friend Leeds, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: “I have not written to you for ever so long…. It’s partly being so busy here, that one’s thoughts are all on the jobs one is doing, and one grudges doing anything else … and partly because I’m rather low because first one and now another of my brothers has been killed…. I rather dread Oxford and 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.”

As 1916 began, there was nothing to suggest that Lawrence would ever get into combat. Work in Cairo was complicated by the fact that there were now three armies to keep informed: the former Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray, which had been evacuated from Gallipoli; the British “Force in Egypt,” commanded by General Sir John Maxwell, which was responsible for defending the Suez Canal; and the Egyptian army, of which General Sir Reginald Wingate was the sirdar. Lawrence complained that there were at least 108 generals in Cairo, and while that may have beenan exaggeration, there were certainly enough generals, together with their staffs, to make Lawrence remark to Leeds, “I’m fed up, and fed up, and fed up:—and yet we have to go on doing it, and indeed we take on new jobs every day.” His daily intelligence bulletins would soon be converted into the famous Arab Bulletin, the brainchild of Hogarth, who came out to Cairo in the uniform of a temporary lieutenant-commander of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve to oversee intelligence matters, and brought with him Gertrude Bell, whose knowledge of the Arab tribes would prove invaluable. The Arab Bulletin was a secret news sheet that quickly grew into a regularly published magazine, of which only twenty-one copies of each issue were initially printed, and which contained the latest information on the Turkish army, as well all the news from inside the Ottoman Empire that could be gleaned from agents and from Turkish prisoners of war. Lawrence was working at least thirteen hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to his previous duties, he was responsible for collecting information about each of the eighty or so divisions of the Turkish army. The only one of them that was “really settled,” he joked to Leeds (ignoring the censor), “the one we ‘defeat’ from time to time on the canal, is located in the Caucasus by the Russians, at Pardima by the Athens people, in Adrianople by Bulgaria, at Midia by Roumania, and in Bagdad by India. The locations of the other thirty-nine regular, and fourty reserve divisions are less certain.” Lawrence was thus in regular touch with the intelligence services of all the Allied nations, and indeed was sent to Athens on a quick trip to help straighten out matters there. As for the Russians, who were fighting the better part of the Turkish regular army in the Caucasus, Lawrence apparently reached out on his own, on the basis of information obtained from the interrogation of the Arab deserter from the Turkish forces, al-Faruqi, “to put the Grand Duke Nicholas in touch with ce rtain disaffected [Turkish] officers in Erzurum,” thus making possible the successful Russian assault on this important fortress town in February 1916.

These were deep waters and confirm the fact that Lawrence was not only being treated as a wunderkind by his superiors in Cairo and in London, but also being encouraged (or at any rate allowed) to expand his reach in every direction. His role in the multifaceted and confusing intelligence world in Egypt remained anomalous, however, even after March 1916, when Clayton and Hogarth simplified the competing intelligence departments in Egypt. The Arab Bureau was housed in a few rooms in the Savoy Hotel, and its mission was to study and develop British policy toward Arabia, a rather vague directive that allowed Hogarth to move and influence events throughout the Arab world, from Basra, where he sent Gertrude Bell to represent him, to Syria and, of course, Mecca, where Sharif Hussein was still promising a revolt and demanding money and weapons. Although Lawrence was unable to transfer himself from the uncongenial task of providing intelligence reports for the headquarters of the two separate British armies as well as the Egyptian army, and would not join the Arab Bureau until October 1916, he could hardly fail to benefit from Hogarth’s presence; and he added to his already substantial list of tasks that of liaison between the various military intelligence departments and the fledging Arab Bureau, most of whose members were civilians, including two members of Parliament: Aubrey Herbert and George Lloyd, both friends of Sykes. The Arab Bureau was thus intended from the outset to be a fairly high-powered organization, with many back-channel connections to the War Office and the war cabinet. It would have considerably more clout than the military intelligence departments in Cairo and Ismailia. Its aim, as Sykes, Clayton, and Hogarth conceived it, was both to encourage the Arab Revolt, and to outmaneuver Paris and Delhi in determining British policy and postwar ambitions in Arabia. The first point was of great importance, since the British now had a substantial number of troops in Egypt who were contributing nothing significant to the war effort, and whom Sir William Robertson, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, DSO, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the French would rather have seen fighting Germans on the western front than sitting idly around Cairo and Ismailia.

General Maxwell’s attempts to break through the Turkish lines and take Gaza had resulted in failure, and the British had suffered three timesthe casualties of the enemy—further proof, if any were needed, of the dogged powers of resistance of Turkish troops under the command of the brilliant German General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein,* whose masterly planning of the entrenchments and artillery around Gaza made it virtually impregnable. Kress had ingeniously combined trenches, machine gun nests, barbed wire, and large preexisting areas of native cactus into a formidable defense system. In addition, the presence of two British armies in Egypt made the French particularly unhappy, since they were deeply suspicious of British intentions in the Middle East, and feared that their ally would try to do them out of Syria by conquering it with British forces, kept in Egypt for just this purpose.

It was not just the Arab Bureau that was created in March 1916: events now began to move rapidly in the Middle East. On instructions from the Foreign Office, the Ј50,000 in gold coins that Sharif Hussein had been demanding as a down payment for the Arab Revolt was paid at last, and at the same time a large stockpile of rifles and ammunition was begun at Port Sudan, to be shipped across the Red Sea to Jidda as soon as the revolt broke out. The British Force in Egypt and the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (the latter survivors of the disaster at Gallipoli) were at last united into one army, henceforth called the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) and placed under the command of General Murray. Prodded by Kitchener, Murray decided it was wasteful to man a British defense line the length of the Suez Canal; he moved his forces forward to El Arish and began to build up a serious network of desert roads,† a narrow-gauge railway for supplies, and a water pipeline across the desert, without all of which he correctly believed no attack on Gaza could possibly succeed.

Lawrence had not been forgotten in all these great changes. Both in Paris and in London, there were signs of the unusual respect in which this comparatively junior young officer—he was then twenty-seven—was held by those at the center of events. By one of the strange coincidences that often mark Lawrence’s life, on March 18 he was awarded—much to his surprise and dismay, given his determination “to biff the French out of Syria"—the French Lйgion d’Honneur, and almost simultaneously he was picked, with Kitchener’s approval, for not one but two delicate and secret tasks in Mesopotamia.

The first task was to assess and report back on the possibility of an Arab uprising there, a project that appealed to everybody in Cairo but was stubbornly resisted by the Indian government. Even though Lawrence carried with him a letter from Sir Henry McMahon to Sir Percy Z. Cox, the chief political officer in Basra, the very last thing Cox and the viceroy wanted to do was to light the flame of Arab nationalism in a part of the Ottoman Empire they hoped to secure for India. Although Kitchener himself was in favor of it, the idea of sending prominent Arab nationalist officers who either had been captured or had deserted from the Turkish army from Cairo to Basra, to link up with Arab nationalist figures there, was fiercely resisted in Delhi. Lawrence’s role was to seek out these figures, most of whom were known to Gertrude Bell, and report back to Cairo on their potential, as well as to give Cairo a clearer picture in general of how intelligence was being gathered in Mesopotamia. Needless to say, this dual role—that of a critical outsider and a snooper—did not make Lawrence popular in Basra; nor did the fact that he was also supposed to tell the Royal Flying Corps and the Indian army intelligence staff in Basra that their method of using serial aerial photography to produce maps—another subject on which he had made himself an expert—was all wrong. At the best of times, Lawrence’s manner of dealing with those who disagreed with him was likely—and often calculated—to provoke resentment, and in Basra he seems to have been at his worst, perhaps because officers in the Indian army were sticklers for pukka sahib dress and behavior, perhaps too because they were inclined to treat Arabs as they would Indian “natives,” with a mixture of racial superiority and brutality that shocked and offended Lawrence.

Lawrence’s second task was more delicate still, and even more bound to create local resentment, since it involved the consequences of an embarrassing defeat. In 1915 an Anglo-Indian army under the command of Major-General Charles Townshend, KCB, had moved north from Basra with the intention of taking Baghdad, and came very close to doing so after a significant victory over the Turks at Ctesiphon, less than thirty miles away. At that point, however, the exhaustion of Townshend’s troops, the precarious length of his line of communication to Basra, and the astonishing ability of the Turks to revive after a defeat forced Townshend back until he reached the small town of Kut al-Amara on the Tigris River, just over 200 miles from Basra, where the Turks very quickly managed to surround and besiege him.

Opinions differ as to whether Townshend might have captured Baghdad if he had pushed on boldly after his victory at Ctesiphon, or whether, once he started to retreat, he should have paused in Kut, but once he was there he was stuck. Since he could no longer feed the horses, he sent his cavalry south, and proceeded to fortify the town. His original force of 30,000 men was by then already reduced to less than half of that by death, wounds, and sickness—the area around Kut was a hellhole of humidity and heat, made even more intolerable by clouds of stinging black flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. By December 7, a week after their arrival, they were surrounded by Turkish troops under the effective command of the formidable Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, an elderly but skilled German general (and a respected military historian), and the Turkish general Khalil Pasha, a nephew of the Ottoman minister of war Enver Pasha. They made three attacks on Kut in December, but eventually decided to dig siege works around the town and block the river to prevent supplies from reaching Townshend. From January through April 1916 the British made four gallant attempts to relieve Kut, all of which were driven back, costing nearly 30,000 British and Indian casualties, while the Turks lost less than 10,000. One of the Turkish casualties was Field Marshal von der Goltz, who died of typhoid fever and was replaced by the Turkish commander of Mesopotamia, Khalil Pasha. In wretched, crowded, unsanitary conditions, with poor sanitation, every kind of disease raging, and no healthy drinking water, the British force was diminishing rapidly, and by April 22 it was clear that there was no option left except unconditional surrender. As for Townshend himself, he was beginning to lose either his nerve or his hold on reality.

Surrendering an Anglo-Indian army to the Turks was thought to be an unacceptable humiliation, particularly by the government of India, which feared the loss in native eyes of British prestige. The situation was made worse because the majority of Townshend’s unfortunate troops were Indian and there were no illusions about what would become of the garrison once they were force-marched into Turkish prisoner-of-war camps. Townshend, in a fit of desperation, proposed that he be authorized to offer the Turkish commander Ј1 million in gold and the surrender of his forty guns in exchange for letting him and his troops “go free on parole.” Surprisingly, though this suggestion infuriated Sir Percy Cox and British senior officers in Basra and Delhi, it found favor with Kitchener, who feared the loss of British prestige throughout Asia if Townshend surrendered. Townshend, as it turned out, perhaps through wishful thinking, had overrated the willingness of Khalil Pasha to negotiate; and what Kitchener had in mind was a two-pronged approach, which involved stirring up Arab desertion and resistance within the Turkish army to put more pressure on the Ottoman government to offer reasonable terms. Since neither Cox nor anybody else in Basra wanted anything to do with either part of the scheme, somebody else was needed to carry it out.

The choice of Aubrey Herbert—Sir Mark Sykes’s friend, a fellow member of Parliament, and a member of the Arab Bureau in Cairo—was a natural one. Herbert was a Turcophile, spoke Turkish, and knew most of the Turkish leaders personally; also, he was urbane, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, the ideal person to offer Khalil Pasha what was, in effect, a Ј1 million bribe. Lawrence was chosen to accompany Herbert because he spoke Arabic. His chief role was to make contact with Arab nationalist officers in the Turkish army who might join with Arab nationalist figures in Basra and Baghdad to start a revolt—or at least shake Khalil’s confidence in his Arab troops. Since this was exactly what Lawrence had done when he provided Grand Duke Nicholas with the names of dissident Arab officers before the Russian attack on Erzurum, it was no doubt hoped that he could perform the same trick twice. The original idea had been to send a senior Arab officer on parole in Cairo to cross the lines and open negotiations with Khalil Pasha, but Cox firmly squashed this, with the result that it was left to Lawrence to make his way up the Tigris on a steamer, a journey of six days, followed soon afterward by Herbert. Lawrence arrived to undergo a difficult interview with the commander of the relief forces, General Sir Percy Lake, KCB, KCMG, and then almost immediately succumbed to a fever, probably a recurrence of his malaria, made worse by the marshy, humid, sweltering air.

During Lawrence’s illness, the last attempt to relieve Kut failed, as did an attempt on April 24 to breach the Turkish blockade of the Tigris with a river steamer loaded with supplies. By this time, Townshend had opened negotiations with Khalil Pasha for the surrender of his force. He had been hoping that General Lake would do the negotiating for him—the idea of offering Khalil Ј1 million in gold to let Townshend’s forces go was a hot potato, which neither general wanted to touch; but in the end it was left to Townshend, who, in Aubrey Herbert’s words, “fears he is going to be blamed whatever happens,” a fear which was fully justified. Although Khalil was “extremely nice,” as Townshend put it, he proved to be a difficult, wily, and cautious negotiator, so Townshend, perhaps hoping, if nothing else, to spread the blame, requested a safe-conduct for three British officers—Colonel W. H. Beach (the head of Indian army intelligence in Basra); Captain Aubrey Herbert, MP; and Captain T. E. Lawrence—to join him in Kut as his “delegates” in the negotiations. By April 28 Townshend had offered Khalil Ј1 million, and Khalil had courteously declined it, under orders from his uncle Enver Pasha in Constantinople, who saw here an opportunity for a propaganda coup even more rewarding than the money. Townshend then sought permission to raise the offerto Ј2 million. On April 29, having failed to materially improve any of Khalil’s terms, Townshend destroyed his guns (thereby losing his last bargaining chip) and finally surrendered. By that time Beach, Herbert, and Lawrence were already on their way upstream for their meeting with Khalil, which was now pointless. As it turned out, Herbert’s command of Turkish and Lawrence’s command of Arabic proved unnecessary, since the conversation took place in French, but it produced no results, even when Colonel Beach raised the offer to Ј3 million.* Lawrence described the colonel in a letter home as “about 32 or 33, very keen & energetic but not clever or intelligent I thought.” Lawrence complained that when he arrived back he would “be nailed within that office at Cairo,” again, and asked his parents to have a new pair of brown shoes made for him, and to send his copy of Aristophanes—a sign that he was still unaware of how much his life was about to change.

Lawrence was sickened by conditions around Kut—it combined all the horrors of trench warfare on the western front with humid, intense heat, unburied bodies, and dense clouds of biting insects—and by the sheer futility of what he was doing there. Townshend’s troops were force-marched across the desert to indescribably brutal prisoner-of-war camps, preyed on by raiding Arabs along the way. Nearly three-quarters of the British troops and half of the Indian troops would be worked or starved to death in captivity, whereas Townshend himself was held in luxurious quarters in a villa on the island of Malki.

In the early summer of 1916, it seemed, in fact, that the British effort in the Middle East was an abject failure. Despite the prevailing contempt for the Turks, and the many glaring deficiencies of their army and government, de Robeck’s attempt to attack Constantinople by sea had failed, the British landing at Gallipoli had failed, and the British attack on Baghdad had ended in a humiliating debacle, as had every attempt to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza. Ramshackle though the Ottoman Empire might be, it had successfully resisted every British attempt to defeat it—only the Russians, whose empire was hardly less ramshackle than that of the Turks, had put a dent in it so far.

Lawrence returned from Basra raging against the inefficiencies of the Anglo-Indian army and administration in Basra, and spent his time on the ship writing a long report criticizing everything from the quality of the lithograph stones used in printing maps to the method of unloading supplies on the docks at Basra. Indeed, the missive was so vitriolic that General Murray’s staff insisted on toning it down before it was shown to him, which was probably just as well for Lawrence. The reorganization of the intelligence departments in Cairo was in full swing, and Lawrence found himself answering to three different departments again, neither in the Arab Bureau nor altogether out of it, and at odds with the staff and the demands of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force intelligence department, toward whom he took an increasingly haughty and insulting tone.

On June 5, two events of great importance occurred. One, which was front-page news all over the world, was the death of Field Marshal the Earl Kitchener, who was traveling to Russia on board the armored cruiser HMS Hampshire when it struck a German mine and went down in the North Sea, drowning Kitchener, his staff, and most of the crew. The other was the outbreak, at long last, of the Arab Revolt. Informed that a force of nearly 4,000 Turkish soldiers accompanied by “a German field mission led by Baron Othmar von Stotzingen” was going to march through the Hejaz to reinforce the Turkish force in Yemen, and shocked by the execution in Beirut and Damascus of twenty-one Arab nationalists, many of them known to Hussein and his sons, Sharif Hussein drew the conclusion that the Ottoman government intended to overthrow and replace him. The sharif himself fired the opening shot of the revolt, with a rifle, through a window in his palace, aimed at the nearby Turkish headquarters.

Thwarted on every other front in the war against Turkey, the British moved quickly. Abdulla had already warned the British on May 23 that the revolt was imminent, and as a result Hogarth and Storrs were already on their way to Hejaz, carrying Ј10,000 in gold sovereigns, as requested. After innumerable delays and adventures, Storrs finally met with Zeid, rather than Abdulla, and was told that the revolt had already begun—or was about to begin, Zeid was not sure—and that his father required an immediate payment of Ј70,000 in gold, delivery of a long list of military supplies and equipment, and assurance that the annual pilgrimage of Indian Muslims to Mecca—on which much of Mecca’s prosperity depended—would not be impeded by the British. Storrs noted that Zeid brought his entourage on board HMS Dufferin, including a pet gazelle “pronging playfully at strangers and eating cigarettes off the mess table.”

The sharif’s arrangements produced an overwhelming initial success—the Turkish garrison in Mecca surrendered; the Turkish force in Taif, where well-to-do Meccans went to escape the summer heat, was besieged (it did not surrender until September); and the Turkish garrison of Jidda, Mecca’s port, surrendered after being bombarded from the sea by HMS Fox. Medina, it was optimistically forecast, would fall at any moment to the forces lead by the emirs Feisal and Abdulla. After nearly two years of promises, extravagant demands, and delays, the Arab uprising seemed at last to be under way.

Lawrence, though still deskbound, was delighted. “This revolt,” he wrote home, “will be the biggest thing in the Near East since 1550.” All the same, he was limited to such roles as overseeing the printing of maps, and designing stamps for the sharif of Mecca at the request of Storrs. The stamps were a political necessity. It was obviously impossible for Hejaz to continue using Ottoman stamps, and it was important to portray the Hejaz as an actual independent Arab state, rather than a former Ottoman province. Lawrence expended considerable energy and imagination on the project, hunting up Arabic designs in mosques, overseeing the engraving and the printing, and making plans “to have flavored gum on the back, so that one may lick without unpleasantness.” The flavored gum turned out to be a mistake—Lawrence produced a flavor so tasty to the Arabs that they licked all the gum off and then couldn’t stick the stamp to the envelope—but he was able to send a few samples home for his youngest brother, Arnie, noting that they might bevaluable one day, and that “things are not going too well” in Arabia, despite the initial successes.

What was not going well was the attempt to take Medina, where the Turks had 14,000 troops, well provided with artillery and supplied by rail from Damascus, against whom the Arab tribesmen, mostly carrying antiquated rifles, could make no headway. The sharif, Lawrence noted in his letter home of October 10, “has a sense of humor,” an opinion which he would soon change, but noted “his weakness is in military operations.” Lawrence complained about the volume of his work, and the amount of interruptions he had to endure in answering telephone calls from the staff, with whom he was fighting a kind of bureaucratic guerrilla war in order to get himself transferred once and for all to the more congenial Arab Bureau. He does not mention the fact that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to Jidda in the company of Storrs. Storrs wrote in his diary, “12. X. 16. On the train from Cairo little Lawrence my super-cerebral companion.”

Just nine days later, Storrs waved good-bye to Lawrence at Rabegh, from where Lawrence was to ride into the desert for his first meeting with Feisal. “Long before we met again,” Storrs wrote later, “he had already begun to write his page, brilliant as a Persian miniature, in the History of England.”

* The Sultan Osman I had originally been ordered from Armstrong by Brazil, which found itself unable to meet the payments for construction. turkey then took over the contract. The Reshadiye was built from scratch for turkey, and included such special features as turkish-style “squat” toilets. A third battleship was also on order.

* Before declaring war an ambassador asked the foreign minister of the government to which he was accredited for the passports of his embassy staff and their families, signaling their imminent departure.

* This is odd, since later, in writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence deliberately abandoned any attempt at systematic or consistent spelling of Arabic names, informing the copy editor, “i spell my names anyhow, to show what rot systems are” (Jonathan Cape edition of 1935, p. 25). But then, as ralph Waldo emerson pointed out, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

* The famous line of Professor John Seeley, in The Expansion of England (1883).

* The book’s subtitle, “a triumph,” is bitterly sarcastic, though seldom recognized as such.

* This applied to many other agreements, including the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration.

* Both the British and the French understood that russia’s ambitions would also have to be satisfied, and would at least include sizable gains in the Caucasus, equal representation in control of the Christian holy places in Jerusalem, and the biggest prize of all: Constantinople and russian control over the exit from and entrance to the Black Sea–the supreme goal of russian foreign policy since Catherine the Great.

† Sir Mark Sykes would reemerge as front-page news in 2008. he had died of the Spanish flu in Paris, in 1919, and been buried in a sealed, lead-lined coffin. With the permission of his family, his remains were exhumed in the hope of finding viral traces of the flu that could be used as a vaccine against newer forms of flu, such as avian flu H1N1.

* This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. it was based on the assumption that–the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples–the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowledge of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.

* The future Lord Carnock, father of the author Sir harold Nicolson, diplomat, politician, prolific author, and husband of Vita Sackville-West.

* The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty–hence their support of the princely states in india until 1947, and their eagerness to place emir Feisal on the throne of iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan; both of these “monarchies” were invented overnight on the British model. ibn Saud, at least, turned himself into a king without British help.

* Kress von Kressenstein shared his command for form’s sake with a turkish general, tala Bey, and both were overseen from Damascus by Jemal Pasha, who was both the political and the military chief of the Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian portions of the ottoman empire.

† The key to building roads in the desert was to lay down wire netting, so that vehicles did not get bogged down in the sand–a huge job of physical labor that was performed for the most part by egyptians.

* Ј3 million would be about $240,000,000 today. if it was to have been paid in gold, the current value would be in the billions!

CHAPTER SEVEN

1917: “The Uncrowned King of Arabia”

After Aqaba Lawrence appeared to some a different person. He was no longer an intelligence officer observing the war from a distance; he had become a warrior, already famous and much admired. He had not only fought and won a significant victory against the Turks—in contrast to the British defeat at Gallipoli and the shame of General Townshend’s surrender at Kut—but also ridden far behind the enemy lines with a price on his head. He had discovered that his name, his impatience with routine, his unorthodox opinions about war, and even his appearance were weapons more powerful than guns, swords, and high explosives. When he thought that humility and modesty were called for, Lawrence could give an excellent performance of both. He had an Englishman’s understanding of the value of those qualities and the degree to which they mattered to other Englishmen of his class, but there was not in fact anything remotely humble or modest about him, as Allenby had instantly perceived. Allenby possessed to the full that most important of skills in a good general, handling men; and throughout the next two years he handled Lawrence brilliantly. In a metaphor that is entirely appropriate to apply to a cavalryman, Allenby rode Lawrence on the loosest of reins, giving him his head, and allowing him to pick his own way forward over difficult ground. With a few notable exceptions, he gave Lawrence goals and directives, and allowed him to reach them in his own way.

Neither Lawrence nor the men he led and served would have been useful if handled in any other way. The Bedouin could be inspired by the right leader, and they could be bribed or shamed into doing great things, but they did not obey orders or submit to threats, so the discipline of a conventional army was beyond them: Lawrence relied instead on the strength of his own personality, and on his seemingly endless supply of British gold sovereigns.

Different as they were—Allenby was huge, overbearing, and notoriously abrupt and outspoken; Lawrence was, by comparison, tiny, soft-spoken, and inclined to be tactful, enigmatic, and often indirect—the two men became, at any rate in public and in their correspondence with each other, a kind of mutual admiration society. Their relationship survived the war, the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and even the fact that Allenby, perhaps the most successful and competent British general of World War I, found himself living in Lawrence’s shadow, a supporting player in an epic where “Lawrence of Arabia” was the star.

Allenby was astute enough, from the beginning, to allow Lawrence direct access, an immense concession for a busy army commander, whom even major-generals approached warily through his chief of staff. To put this in perspective, it is as if an acting major commanding a small force of French guerrillas behind enemy lines had direct access to Eisenhower whenever he pleased in the second half of 1944. It was shrewd of Allenby to see that Lawrence would never be able to go through the normal chain of command, and also to understand, perhaps better than Lawrence himself, that Lawrence’s curiously inverted vanity and sense of being “special” could be satisfied only by going directly to the top. For a long time Lawrence was accused of not taking his own rank seriously, and that is certainly true. In later years he always talked about “Colonel Lawrence"as if that were a separate person, whose legend kept on growing, marching on indestructibly while the real Lawrence sought to hide. But the truth was that Lawrence considered himself, from the first, above such commonplace things as rank. Once, he had expressed an ambition to be a general and knighted before he was thirty; now, neither of those ambitions, though both were within his grasp, was enough to satisfy him. He had become, instead, something much more: a hero on a grand, unconventional, and glamorous scale.

On his arrival in Cairo on July 10, 1917, after the capture of Aqaba, Lawrence told Clayton, his nominal superior officer, that there was much more he could do, if Clayton “thought I had earned the right to be my own master,” a telling phrase, and produced a sketch map of his plans—ambitious enough to startle Allenby when he saw it. Lawrence proposed to use seven separate Arab “forces” to disrupt the Turkish railway system, from Homs and Hama, north of Damascus, to Maan in the south, and to threaten vital railway lines and junctions deep inside Lebanon and Palestine, throwing Turkish communications into confusion, and perhaps even seizing Damascus.

With his usual quick mind, Lawrence had guessed that Allenby’s intention was to advance from El Arish to Jerusalem, though he could not have known that David Lloyd George, on sending Allenby out to replace General Murray, had said “that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people.” Allenby was determined to give Lloyd George what he wanted, and instantly saw the advantages of using the Arabs to disrupt Turkish communications and supply lines, rather than have them try once more to take Medina, and probably fail again. He had also been concerned, not unnaturally, about advancing on Gaza and Beersheba with his right flank “in the air,” a position no competent general wants to find himself in. Despite the forbidding terrain and the lack of roads between the coastline of Palestine and the Dead Sea, an enterprising Turkish or German commander could still assemble a force large enough to strike westward against Allenby; and Lawrence was proposing to fill this vacuum with Arab irregulars, advancing north from Aqaba parallelto Allenby’s line of march. Feisal’s forces, whatever they might be—both Feisal and Lawrence were often wildly optimistic about numbers—would become Allenby’s extended right flank, freeing him to feint at Gaza, then use all his strength to advance on Beersheba and outflank the Turkish lines.

Allenby did not necessarily expect Lawrence to succeed with these ambitious plans, but so long as Lawrence and the Arabs were active on his right and cut Turkish telegraph wires, he would be content. The Turks who were engaged in patrolling or repairing the single-line railway to Medina, defending Medina and Maan against Arab raiders from the desert, would be pinned down, unable to be moved quickly to threaten his right flank. For all practical purposes in the battle to come, they might as well not exist.

Lawrence moved fast to capitalize on his newfound position. He secured Allenby’s permission to transfer his base from faraway Wejh to Aqaba—no easy task, because it involved securing Hussein’s agreement to place Feisal and his Arab forces under Allenby’s command, as well as squaring General Wingate in Khartoum, and drawing on the stores at Rabegh that had been intended for Abdulla’s use. The shifting relationships between Sharif Hussein’s sons, consistent only in their obedience to their stern father’s authority, required a constant, careful study of the Hashemite family and its moods, a subject on which Lawrence was already an expert. It also involved something he did not regret: further friction with the French, who wanted to see the Arab army tied up trying to take Medina, as opposed to seeing it in a position to advance into Syria. Indeed Colonel Brйmond and the French military mission were in Jidda for the main purpose of preventing this.

One by one, these difficulties were sorted out. Clayton wisely chose, with Lawrence’s agreement, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce to take command at Aqaba, and turn it into a secure base for the Arab army, leaving Lawrence free to go inland without worrying about supplies and support. Joyce, who had been offended by Lawrence’s unmilitary appearance and flippant manner when they had met briefly at Port Sudan in1916, had become a convert, and would be a lifelong friend and admirer. On paper, Joyce was Lawrence’s commander, but in fact he was the firmly planted anchor to Lawrence’s ambitious schemes, a broad, six-foot-tall pillar of strength, common sense, and knowledge of how to get things done by the book and—more important— despite the book, in the army.

Lawrence was sent off at once to explain matters to King Hussein. The sharif had announced his newly assumed title as king of the Hejaz late in 1916, over the repeated objections of the British, who feared the effect this would have on ibn Saud as well as on the presumably more democratically-minded Arab nationalists in Syria. Lawrence boarded HMS Dufferin, which had been placed at his disposal, and stopped for one day in Wejh. There the RFC provided an airplane to fly him 100 miles inland to Jeida, “a little palm garden,” where Feisal and Joyce were encamped. It is a mark of Lawrence’s new status that naval ships and aircraft were now his for the asking. At Jeida, comfortable under the palms, he discussed with Feisal the best way of approaching his father, and also a new factor in the Arab army. Jaafar Pasha, a Baghdadi who was a former Turkish officer, had become Feisal’s chief of staff and had also organized a number of Arab prisoners of war from the Turkish army into a uniformed group, quite separate from the Bedouin tribesmen who made up the bulk of Feisal’s forces. Jaafar’s regulars were professional soldiers, not irregulars, and while their number was still small, they would play an increasingly important role in the Arab army.

In Jidda, Lawrence met King Hussein, whom he described as “an obstinate, narrow-minded, suspicious character, little likely to sacrifice his vanity to forward a unity of control.” This was putting it mildly—almost all the British, while they admired him as a “splendid old gentleman,” found Hussein difficult to deal with, unreasonable, intolerably long-winded, and vain. The only exception was Ronald Storrs, who had been negotiating with the old man since 1914, and described him more generously as a “gracious and venerable patriarch … of unparalleled dignity and deportment,” and whom the king in turn addressed familiarly as ya ibni(“my son”) or ya azizi(“my dear”).

Toward Lawrence, King Hussein seems to have been more than usually suspicious, perhaps because of Lawrence’s youth, perhaps because he feared Lawrence’s growing influence over Feisal, perhaps because the shrewd old man guessed that Lawrence’s passion for the Arab cause was deeply conflicted, that he did not so much want to give the Arabs what they wanted as what the British wanted them to have. In any case Colonel Wilson, General Wingate’s patient and long-suffering representative in Jidda, managed to talk Hussein around to the advantages of putting Feisal under Allenby’s command instead of his own; and with that the king lapsed into a long and “discursive” description, “as usual without obvious coherence,” of his religious beliefs, a tactic he seems to have used with British visitors to prevent them from asking questions he did not want to answer. For their part, both Wilson and Lawrence were embarrassed by the supposition that they knew more about the Sykes-Picot agreement than the king did and by trying to put the best light on it they could—wasted efforts, since the king by now surely knew more about the treaty than he let on, and was better at dissembling than either of them.

Lawrence seems to have made a quick, unauthorized visit to Mecca, a city closed to unbelievers, certainly without the knowledge of the king or Feisal, to shop for a gold dagger to replace one that he had given to a Howeitat chief. For an Arab of Lawrence’s rank to go without a curved gold dagger in his belt was the equivalent of being “half-naked,” and he was determined to have the best and the lightest dagger that could be made, one that would establish his sharifian status at a glance. Though in general Lawrence disliked being tied down by possessions, there were certain areas in which he was unapologetically extravagant, and in which only the best would do: pistols, fine bookbindings, motorcycles, the art he commissioned for Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and the famous dagger were all examples of this. He would later write in detail about ordering the dagger from a goldsmith named Gasein, “in the third little turning to the left off the main bazaar,” and once it was delivered, he would wear it through the rest of the war, whenever he was in Arab dress. It wouldbecome something of a trademark, and was often wrongly described as being the symbol of “a prince of Mecca,” a title which did not exist, and which he never claimed.

The pleasure Lawrence felt at the king’s rapid assent was marred by news from Cairo that Auda Abu Tayi and his Howeitat were in secret negotiations with the Turks, which, if they succeeded, would have meant the loss of Aqaba, and everything that Lawrence had planned. Lawrence’s naval friend Captain Boyle provided him with a fast armed steamship, HMS Hardinge, to take him at flank speed north to Aqaba, where Nasir told him that the Turks had indeed already retaken several outposts and gave him a “swift camel” and a guide to take him to Auda’s camp in the desert. Lawrence intended to surprise Auda, and did—he “dropped in on them,” walking unarmed into Auda’s tent, where the old warrior was in conversation with his confederates, just in time to join in their meal. After the ritual fulsome greetings of desert courtesy, Lawrence revealed that he knew about Auda’s correspondence with the Turks, and was even able to quote phrases from the letters that had passed between Auda and the governor of Maan. Auda dismissed it all with a laugh—unbeknownst to him, he explained, one of his men who could read and write had sent a letter to the Turkish governor under Auda’s seal, seeking out terms for his switching sides. The governor had agreed on a price, and to a demand for a down payment. When Auda found out about it, he caught the messenger with the gold in the desert and robbed him “to the skin,” for his own benefit. It was a mere matter of business—brigandage being the main business of the Bedouin.

Behind this farce, however, Lawrence correctly divined that Auda had grievances strong enough to tempt him to seek out better terms from the Turks, one of them being that Lawrence was receiving more attention than Auda for the capture of Aqaba, and the other that the gold Auda had been promised was slow in coming. Lawrence explained in detail what was on the way—more gold, rifles, ammunition, food—and made “a down payment” on the gold that would be coming to Auda when Feisal arrived in Aqaba with the rest of the army. Like two old friends, they laughedover the incident, but it served as a lesson to Lawrence that even the best of the Bedouin were cold and crafty, and that it was foolhardy to make them wait for their money. Henceforth, sacks of gold sovereigns would always be the most urgent of his supplies, more important by far than high explosives, ammunition, or fuse wire.

Showing a capacity for duplicity that equaled Auda’s, Lawrence then returned on the Hardingeto Cairo, where he declared that he had looked into the situation and that there was “no spirit of treachery abroad,” and vouched for Auda’s loyalty. In this Lawrence recognized a great truth; “the crowd wanted book-heroes,” and would never understand the complexity of a man like Auda, who not only was moved by greed for gold, but, as a tribal leader, would always want to keep a way open to the enemy. Over the next two years Lawrence would have many occasions to deal with the combination of greed and caution that was a natural part of Arab politics, an instinctive survival mechanism that would emerge in moments of setback or defeat, and that had to be concealed at all costs from the simpler minds of the British leaders.

Lawrence’s duplicity has been an issue for some who have written about him, and in fact a number of biographies are intended to debunk him wholly or in part. This is partly Lawrence’s own fault. He sometimes embellished the truth, and he invariably placed himself at the center of events, but it must be said that when the British government finally released most of the papers and documents relating to Lawrence, almost everything he claimed was confirmed in meticulous detail. Sir Ernest Dowson, KBE, the director-general of the Egyptian Survey, who had clashed sharply with Lawrence over the transliteration of Arabic place-names on maps in 1914 and later became an admirer, remarked on his “puckishness,” and went on to comment: “Many men of sense and ability were repelled by the impudence, freakishness and frivolity he trained so provocatively … and regarded him in consequence at the bottom as a posturing stage player whose tinsel exploits were the fruits of freely lavished gold.” (Dowson also shrewdly observed that it was “idle to pretendhe was not ambitious. He was vastly so. But, like all men of large calibre, he was ambitious for achievement rather than recognition.”)

The fact remains that Lawrence loved to “take the Mickey out of someone” as the English say, particularly if that person was pompous, obstructive, or slow to give him what he wanted, and not everyone enjoyed being on the receiving end, or forgave him for the experience.

A sense of humor is often the most difficult thing to convey about great men. Winston Churchill, for example, certainly had a robust sense of humor, but it was very often at the expense of people who were in no position to answer back, ^*and reads badly in cold print. Something similar is true of Lawrence. With him, exaggeration was a form of teasing rather than boasting, and was usually aimed at those who were senior to him in rank and slow to recognize his ability. Once he had joined the ranks as a simple aircraftman or soldier after the war, he never did it to his barracks mates; he targeted only officers who had provoked him by some form of injustice to those mates.

Warfare and politics, of course, are a different matter; in both, duplicity is a weapon, and Lawrence used it expertly. During the war Lawrence was obliged to conceal from his Arab friends the ambitions of France and Britain in the territory the Arabs supposed themselves to be fighting for, as well as to conceal from his British superiors the problems of the Arab army. He was not Sarah’s son for nothing, however—tactics and politics apart, in the things that mattered most to him he always told the truth, however painful for others or himself.

No sooner was Lawrence back at Aqaba—which was rapidly being transformed into an armed base, with a landing strip for the RFC and a stone jetty built by British sailors for unloading supplies—than a letter from Sir Mark Sykes brought alarming hints that the British government was secretly negotiating with the Ottoman government in the hope of Turkey’s accepting a negotiated peace. It was not only Auda who was putting out feelers to the Turks. In the absence of a significant British victory, a negotiated peace with Turkey was a constant temptation to a wily politician like Lloyd George. From the British point of view, it would have freed large numbers of troops in the Middle East to reinforce the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the western front in France for the one big attack that might perhaps bring the war to an end in 1917; and it would no doubt have negated all British promises to the Arabs. From the Turks’ point of view, it would have enabled them to get out of the war with the minimum of loss to their empire, and to reexert Turkish hegemony over Arabs, Kurds, Christians, and Jews, and whatever remained of the Armenian population after the genocide. ^*Sykes, ever the enthusiast, claimedto have returned to London and put an end to this attempt by facing down Lloyd George—a delusion, given the prime minister’s habit of making promises he had no intention of keeping. Sykes was just as overconfident of his ability to handle Lloyd George as he was of his ability to handle Picot and King Hussein. As usual, Sykes was bubbling over with contradictory ideas: Lawrence should be given a knighthood for what he had accomplished so far, and must persuade the Arabs that they would be better off in the end under ten years of British rule, or “tutelage,” as Sykes put it gracefully, before achieving independence. The French must be made to see that French colonial rule over the Arabs was out of the question—he would go to Paris himself and “slam” this to Picot. The British must stick together loyally with the French in the Middle East, and not let the Arabs divide them along the lines of “You very good man, him very bad man,” in Sykes’s cheery phrase, for despite his sympathy for every racial and ethnic group, there was still an element of the pukka sahib in him, which he was unable to altogether suppress.

Middle Eastern diplomacy: Sir Mark Sykes’s cartoon of himself negotiating with Sharif Hussein in Jidda.

There were many reasons for these well-meant contradictions on the part of the imaginative and mercurial Sykes. The bloody stalemate on the western front showed no sign of ending; the abdication of the czar in February 1917 had led to a precarious stalemate on the eastern front as Kerensky’s government sought to keep Russia in the war, while the Russian people yearned increasingly for peace. The United States had been drawn into the war in April 1917 by the folly of Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine attacks in the Atlantic; and the Americans’ entry had brought with it Woodrow Wilson’s stern warning against further colonial acquisitions by the European powers, and had enshrined the principles of “self-determination” and democracy as the basis for any postwar settlement. The Sykes-Picot agreement seemed to be exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that Wilson was warning against, and it no longer looked to the British, or even to Sykes himself, like an attractive solution to the problems of the Middle East.

Early in September Lawrence wrote a long letter to Sykes from Aqaba, objecting to the continuation of a policy that would, in effect, marginalizethe Arabs, and anticipating in detail the effect the Balfour Declaration would have on King Hussein and Feisal. The letter is particularly interesting because it is couched in the form of a request to know exactly what he should tell Feisal about every point Sykes raises, and among other things predicts accurately how bitterly opposed the Arabs would be to Zionist attempts to purchase large amounts of land in Palestine, whatever efforts were made to sweeten the pill. Clayton, who was nobody’s fool, in effect “spiked” Lawrence’s letter, and instead wrote back to Lawrence that the Sykes-Picot agreement was as good as dead, so he (and Feisal) should stop worrying about it.

Lawrence’s concerns on the subject cannot have been stilled by the arrival of a French contingent at Aqaba, under the command of Captain Rosario Pisani, an experienced French colonial officer. The French detachment was dwarfed by the 800 uniformed Arab soldiers under Jaafar, by the tribesmen who were coming in daily to join Feisal’s forces, and by the British technicians, instructors, and supply personnel, but Pisani’s presence and the French tricolor were a daily reminder that France’s claims in the Middle East were not about to go away as easily as Clayton predicted.

It is in this light that one must consider the ambitious plans Lawrence made to demonstrate the fighting power of the Bedouin—he could not determine British policy, but he could perhaps undermine it by demonstrating just how effective the Arabs could be in the field. By their achievements he would enforce their title to the lands that they claimed—and that, at least in his own mind, he claimed for them. The sooner they moved north, into Syria, the better.

But “Syria” was, of course, merely “a geographical expression,” as Metternich famously described Italy, and no two people agreed on what it was, or should be. Lawrence, for the moment stuck at Feisal’s “base camp,” now that Feisal had moved his headquarters to Aqaba, gave some serious thought to what lay ahead, and carefully studied the map. He had spent the better part of the war so far drawing up British army maps, and nobody was better at that most basic skill of warfare, the ability to look ata map and visualize what it means in terms of tactics, strategy, and lines of communication. He concluded that the war in the Hejaz had been won by the move to Wejh; that the threat to Mecca was over; and that the railway line to Medina should be cut just often enough to keep the Turks fully occupied repairing and defending it, but never so completely as to tempt them to abandon Medina, where they were, in effect, bottled up, half starved and reduced to eating their mules and camels, which might have carried them to Rabegh or Mecca. This was a program he could continue, and eventually delegate to others, as he moved north toward Maan, providing Allenby with the all-important flank on the right as he advanced on Jerusalem. At the same time, Lawrence needed to expand his contacts with anti-Turkish elements in Syria; the Hejaz was empty space, crossed only by the nomadic Bedouin, but as Feisal’s army moved north it would be entering areas that were cultivated, where peasants worked the land and clung to their villages, and relied on roads, however primitive, to sell their produce. These Arabs depended on some form of order, and recognized that in their region, unlike the Hejaz, not everyone was automatically, even unthinkingly, Muslim.

Syria held ancient and long-established communities of Christians—Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Arab Christians—and of Druses, Circassians, Kurds, Jews, Shia and Sunni Arabs, and many smaller, dissenting Arabic sects, as well as Algerian refugees who had fled from the violent French suppression of Abd el Kader’s uprising in the mid-nineteenth century. While it was not exactly a melting pot so much as a mosaic of different groups, each with a unique ancient history of martyrdom, special privileges, and animosity toward neighbors in the next village or town, it was very unlike the Hejaz. Many of these Syrian communities—perhaps most of them—were unlikely to greet with enthusiasm the arrival of rapacious armed nomads led by a Meccan sharif.

Syria was also an area of great cities—Jerusalem, Beirut, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Damascus—each of which had an educated elite, or rather several competing elites, famous educational or religious institutions, and a thriving commercial life. Chains of mountains further divided Syria. Also, the coastal areas of Palestine and Lebanon were sharply separated from the inland area, and indeed boasted of an entirely different culture and history; and the inland area was divided into smaller segments by rivers such as the Jordan and the Litani, and by valleys or wadis or by rugged hills. In the absence of paved roads (the small number of automobiles in the Ottoman Empire made it unrewarding to build paved roads, and much of Syria still depended on the remains of the roads the Romans had built), the railway system was the one link that made commerce other than the caravan and the mule train possible.

THE HEJAZ RAILWAY

Reviewing all this from “a palm-garden” in Aqaba, Lawrence evolved a strategy, which was to move Feisal’s army northwest into the desert beyond Wadi Sirhan, then directly north following the railway into the strategic heartland of Syria. Lawrence hoped to enlist along the way each of the tribes in the semi-cultivated area where the desert began, seventy-five miles east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, then climb 300 miles north up “a ladder of tribes,” as he put it, until they reached Damascus, while at the same time constantly attacking the Turks’ railway so that they could neither feed nor reinforce their troops.

Those who think of Lawrence merely as a dashing guerrilla leader overlook both the originality of his plan and his capacity for detail. He compared “camel raiding-parties” operating on the border between cultivated land and the desert to ships, able to attack at will and by surprise, then break off the fight and retire into the desert, where the Turks could not follow them. He hit on the essential advantage of the guerrilla: “tip and run” tactics, “using the smallest force in the quickest time, at the furthest place.” This would of course negate the Turks’ superiority in numbers and heavy weapons—a lesson that would later be put to good use by the British Long Range Desert Group in the Libyan Desert in World War II (as well as by Mao in the Chinese civil war, and by the Vietcong in Vietnam). Rather than seek a decisive battle, Lawrence was determined at all costs to avoidone; his object was to bleed the Turks to death by pinpricks, while forcing them to waste their troops trying to defend nearly 800 miles of railway line.

He worked out with great precision exactly what his guerrillas needed. They would ride female camels, and each man would carry half a bag (forty-five pounds) of flour “slung on his riding saddle,” enough for six weeks. A camel needed to drink every third day, and the rider would carry at most a pint of water, to see him through the second day of marching from one well to another. This would give the force the capability of riding “a thousand miles out and home,” covering anywhere between fifty and 110 miles a day. It was Lawrence’s idea to arm as many men as possible with Lewis light, drum-fed machine guns, to be used as long-range, automatic sniper rifles, rather than in their conventional role, as well as a rifle, and to keep those who had automatic weapons “ignorant of their mechanism.” If the gun jammed, they were not to waste time trying to clear it but throw it away, and use their rifle instead—speed was essential; attacks should be over in minutes. (Lawrence himself rode with a Lewis gun, from which he had removed the bulky cooling shroud, the butt secured in a leather bucket slung from his saddle, as well as the Lee-Enfield rifle that Feisal had presented to him, a bag containing 100 rounds, a pistol, and his dagger.) So far as possible, each man should be instructed in the basics of high explosives, though in practice it was usually Lawrence or one of the other British officers who did the delicate job of planting them and handling detonators.

The most difficult problem Lawrence faced he turned to his advantage. No tribe would fight in the territory of another, and it was impossible to mix men of different tribes in any raiding force. Instead, when he entered the territory of a new tribe, he would take on new men from that tribe, thus automatically giving himself a fresh force at regular intervals, and giving the men and their camels a chance to rest. A further benefit was that his force would change continually in size and composition, making it more difficult for the Turks to guess how strong it was or where it would strike. In every respect, this was the opposite of a well-trained, disciplined army of whatever size. Far from handling the weapons with respect, the men would toss them aside the moment they jammed; instead of being molded into a tightly bonded unit, the men would comeand go interchangeably; it would be an army without ranks or any visible chain of command, and without written orders, since the tribesmen were for the most part illiterate.

As the Turks, reinvigorated by new supplies and the sound advice of General Erich von Falkenhayn, moved south in an attempt to retake Aqaba, Lawrence showed his command of modern warfare while Feisal was at Aqaba by using bombing raids carried out by the RFC to slow the enemy down, while the Howeitat, under Auda, blew up railway bridges and culverts in the opposite direction to distract the Turks’ attention.

As for Lawrence, he decided to carry out a raid on the “Mudawara, the great water station in the desert eighty miles south of Maan,” sixty miles inland, directly to the east of Aqaba. If Lawrence could blow in the well, the Turks would need “to add so many more water wagons to their trains” that they would be hard pushed to supply the garrison at Medina at all. Since the insulated cable and the exploder sent from Cairo had arrived without the right kind of detonators, Lawrence borrowed three from the captain of HMS Humberand successfully exploded one on the deck of the monitor, proving to himself that he had mastered the technique. Tinkering with explosive devices and mastering the art of demolition by trial and error would be one of Lawrence’s more dangerous activities over the next two years.

Mudawara was guarded by a substantial Turkish garrison, so Lawrence added to his Arab forces “two forceful sergeant-instructors,” one to display the capabilities of the Lewis gun and the other to do the same for the Stokes trench mortar. “Lewis,” as the Lewis gun instructor was nicknamed, was an Australian; “Stokes,” also nicknamed after his weapon, was “a placid English yeoman.” It is a tribute to Lawrence’s skill at leadership that he was able to persuade the Arabs to accept two red-faced uniformed European unbelievers as fighting companions, and also that he was also able to steer Lewis and Stokes through the hardships of living like Bedouin.

Lawrence and his small party rode out of Aqaba on September 7, in a temperature of 123 degrees, measured in the shade of palm trees by the sea. Inland, on the yellowish sand that reflected the sun, and among the red sandstone rocks, the temperature quickly rose far higher. They rode for two days at a slow pace, to accustom the sergeants to camel riding in the desert, and arrived at Auda’s camp in Guweira just in time for the daily Turkish bombing raid—an occurrence not to be taken lightly, given the amount of high explosives Lawrence’s camels carried, all of which could be detonated by a single red-hot bomb fragment.

Guweira was a small village, the site of an abandoned Ottoman fort, a few miserable buildings in a sea of fine yellow sand and small hillocks, set next to a black volcanic rock. Auda’s encampment, however, was a mass of people and camels shaded only by a huge cloud of swarming flies, a gathering of hundreds of the Howeitat, many of them discontented with the fact that Auda kept for himself most of the money he was now receiving from the British. It was impossible even for Auda, who was in any case enjoying himself in his tent with a new young wife, to gather enough of the Howeitat for Lawrence’s purpose.

Lawrence decided to go forward on his own, with his two sergeants and the small party of Arabs with whom he had left Aqaba, riding south to Wadi Rumm, where a party of Arabs friendly to Feisal was said to be encamped. The sun was so ferocious that even the Bedouin complained, so Lawrence “played about,” pretending to enjoy himself, to keep their spirits up. But when they camped for the night one of the Arabs, a Harithi sharif named Aid, came to Lawrence, who lay sleeping on the ground wrapped in his robe, to say, “in a chilled voice, ‘Lord I am gone blind.’ “ The sun reflecting off the sand had been so intense as to burn out his retinas.

With this grim reminder of the desert’s danger, they rode on the next day through a steep valley with rose-colored cliffs 1,000 feet high, sometimes even rising to 2,000 feet, between great boulders the size of houses that had fallen from the heights. They crossed a valley so broad that in it “a squadron of airplanes could have wheeled in formation"; then, at sunset,they climbed a zigzag trail up the cliff to a ledge where they halted, near a spring around which were placed several villages of tents. Wadi Rumm was as beautiful as Petra, but the little party was not cheered by it. With the blinded Aid sunk in misery, Lawrence sought to persuade the other chiefs to join him, but such was their resentment of Auda that they refused. Lawrence decided to leave his two sergeants behind when one of the Arabs sympathetic to Lawrence guaranteed their life with his own—a necessary precaution, for feelings were running high and two infidels with not a word of Arabic between them were at grave risk without Lawrence to look after them. Having done his best for the sergeants, he rode back with one companion all the way to Aqaba, where he obtained from Feisal the promise of twenty more camels to carry the explosives, and the help of Sharif Abdulla el Feir, “his best man present,” who would ride back to Rumm with Lawrence to quell the mutiny in Feisal’s name.

Over the next few days Sharif Abdulla succeeded in patching things up, and the extra camels arrived, accompanied by four of Feisal’s enormous black Sudanese slaves, each armed with a rifle, sword, dagger, and pistol. These slaves were fanatically loyal to their master, and were intended to protect Lewis and Stokes, two to each sergeant, until they returned safely to Aqaba.

This precaution shows the degree to which clan and tribal animosities threatened to undo the capture of Aqaba, as well as the degree to which the different tribes and clans were sensitive to their own feuds and rivalry, and always subject to the ever-present temptation to test whether the Turks, who were at least fellow Muslims, might outbid the British for their support. Lawrence, who would be remembered generations later as “the Englishman who brought the gold,” distributed it lavishly, but that inevitably had the effect of making the Bedouin ever more greedy, a reality of desert warfare which he tried scrupulously to hide from his superiors.

On September 16 Lawrence led a motley and ill-assorted group of men out of Rumm, about 120 in all, including the two saddle-sore sergeants and their bodyguards, and the blind Sharif Aid, who was determined to go on. They camped for the night on a “strange flat of yellow mud,” and ate"gazelle meat and hot bread,” as Lawrence made his plans for the attack on Mudawara, which he expected to reach at the end of the next day.

In the morning they rode across a wide and varied plain of sand, limestone, and flint, only to find, when they halted, that the Turks had fouled the pool by throwing dead camels into it a few months ago. The water was covered in thick, oily green slime, and disgusting to smell or taste, but there was no help for it but to fill their water skins, despite the stench. If they took Mudawara, they would have access to water, but if they did not, they could not retreat without having first watered their camels and provided a water supply for themselves.

At dusk, they arrived close to the station at Mudawara, and Lawrence, the two sergeants, and the Arab leaders dismounted and crawled forward from sand mound to sand mound and through the deserted Turkish trench lines to a point from which they could see the buildings and the tents of the Turkish garrison. To Lawrence’s disappointment, he did not see any way of rushing the station with his mixed force, in whose reliability he had been rapidly losing confidence. There was no good cover for Stokes and the mortar, or for Lewis and the machine gun, within the range of their weapons, and it seemed to Lawrence very likely that an attack would fail. There was never anything amateurish about Lawrence’s battle craft. It is a measure of his innate professionalism that he never allowed enthusiasm or his gift for improvisation to cloud his judgment. He did not trust his force in a pitched fight with superior numbers, and with Sharif Aid blinded, he did not have an Arab leader who could rally the men once they started to suffer casualties, as they surely would. He decided to withdraw, blow up a Turkish train, and let his Arabs loot it; this, if nothing else, might raise their morale a bit, and lower that of the Turks.

The next morning he found a convenient spot along the line to lay the mine. At this spot, a short two-arched bridge crossed a gulley, about 200 yards from a ledge on which Stokes and Lewis could place “their toys” with a good field of fire in whichever direction the train approached, and from which they could retreat under cover if necessary. Lawrence wasalways careful with the lives of his men, Arab or British, and disliked spending them unnecessarily. The swashbuckling, “romantic” picture of Lawrence charging on his camel, along with his Bedouin tribesmen in their flowing robes wielding their gleaming curved sabers, caught the public imagination once he became famous, but he was first and foremost a gifted, practical soldier who knew what he was doing. Although his military training was minimal (unlike his omnivorous reading of classics ancient and modern about strategy), Lawrence might as well have attended Sandhurst as an officer cadet—from the very first he displayed the instincts of a born soldier. However wild and undisciplined the Arabs might be, Lawrence was as careful as any professional in choosing the right ground, selecting a field of fire, working out his logistics down to the last bullet and pint of water, and preparing an avenue of retreat in case it proved necessary. Guerrilla warfare it might be, with all the messiness that such warfare entails, but he waged it with the care and instincts of an exceptionally capable regular officer. He left nothing to chance, right down to the smallest detail; what is more, he served in the field as his own adjutant, regimental sergeant major, and quartermaster sergeant. This is all the more impressive when one considers that he had nobody to advise him, nobody on whom he could call for reinforcements, and no assurance that the Bedouin would obey him. There was also the certainty that if he was seriously wounded, he would die, and if he was captured alive in Arab dress by the Turks, he would be tortured, then executed as a spy.

He had the camels unloaded and led away to a position where they could graze unseen (first making sure that the Arabs scraped salt from an overhanging limestone ledge for them—Lawrence had the Napoleonic eye for detail that makes a great commander), then kneaded his blocks of gelignite into a viscous lump that half-filled a sandbag, and buried it in the stone ballast under the tracks. He then had to replace the stones carefully one by one, brush the whole area clean of footprints with the hem of his cloak, and unroll the heavy insulated cables. These turned out to be an unexpected headache—burying them left a break in the sand’s thin,wind-created crust, and the stiff cables tended to rise in one place when they were buried in another. In the end, Lawrence had to weight the cables down with heavy stones to flatten them out, fill in the long trenches and smooth out the sand by brushing an empty sandbag over the surface, then use a bellows and his own cloak to create ripples in the sand that matched the rest. Finally, he had to remove every footprint for 200 yards from the mine to the ledge where the sergeants had placed their weapons. It took him two hours to lay the charge, and five hours to render everything invisible to the naked eye.

Salem, the most senior of Feisal’s slaves, was given the honor of wielding the exploder, and Lawrence spent the afternoon teaching him how—it required a firm but not overhasty push to produce the right spark. As the sun began to set, they returned to where the camels should have been, only to find that the Arabs had moved up to a high ridge, where they were clearly outlined against the setting sun, attracting the attention of the Turkish outposts, and drawing a certain amount of nervous rifle fire. Lawrence seldom complained about the Bedouin—it was in their interest and his to portray them as natural fighting men with a born talent for desert warfare—but later, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he noted with disapproval how their contempt for the Turks made them incautious, and that unlike British soldiers they were restless and noisy while waiting, without the patience to stay put and remain quiet.

In the morning, as Lawrence had feared, a Turkish patrol marched out of the station in search of them. Lawrence ordered thirty of the Arabs to open fire and then lead the Turks as slowly as possible away from the railway tracks, where they might discover the mine, and into the surrounding sand hills. At noon, a stronger patrol appeared, and Lawrence was just about to order his party to pack up and retreat, leaving the mine behind in the hope of returning another day and setting it off under a train, when he saw the smoke of a locomotive in the distance. In an instant, he placed his Arabs behind a long ridge running parallel to the track, from which they could fire at the train at a distance of about 150 yards once it was derailed. He left one man standing up to watch the train’s progress, incase it was full of troops and should suddenly stop to let them off for a rush attack, but to his relief, the train did nothing of the sort. Drawn by two locomotives—a welcome bonus for Lawrence—the train kept on coming. Turkish soldiers stuck the muzzles of their rifles out of the open windows, or sheltered on the roof of each carriage behind sandbags, prepared to fend off an Arab attack, but they clearly did not anticipate the full magnitude of what was to come.

As the second locomotive began to cross the bridge, Lawrence raised his hand and Salem the slave pushed the exploder. With a mighty roar, the entire train vanished in a huge explosion of black dust, 100 feet high and equally wide. “Out of the darkness came a series of shattering crashes, and long loud metallic clangings of ripped steel, while many lumps of iron and plate, with one wheel of a locomotive, whirled up suddenly black out of the cloud against the sky, and sailed musically over our heads to fall slowly into the desert behind.” For a few moments there was absolute silence as the cloud of smoke drifted away; then the Arabs opened fire on the shattered carriages, while Lawrence, dodging under their bullets, ran back to join the two sergeants on their ledge. By the time Lawrence got to them, the Arabs were leaving their positions to rush for the train and loot it, while those Turks who had survived the explosion fired back desperately. He found Lewis and Stokes calmly going about their work, Lewis sweeping the Turks off the roofs of the carriages with his machine gun, and Stokes firing his mortar bombs over the carriages to the far side, where the Turks huddled on the embankment. Stokes’s second shot made “a shambles of the group, and the survivors broke eastward as they ran. … The sergeant grimly traversed with drum after drum into their ranks till the open sand was littered with dead bodies,” while the Bedouin “were beginning like wild beasts to tear open the carriages and fall to plunder. It had taken nearly ten minutes.”

Lawrence had destroyed the bridge completely. All the carriages were smashed, including one that contained sick and wounded Turks, some of them dying of typhus. Lawrence found that the Turks “had rolled dead and dying into a bleeding heap at the splintered end” of this carriage. One locomotive was smashed beyond repair; the other was less seriously damaged, but Lawrence calmly finished this one off by attaching explosive to its boiler and detonating it. The train had been full of troops, civilian refugees, and the families of Turkish officers. The Bedouin, “raving mad … were rushing about at top-speed bare-headed and half-naked, screaming, shooting in the air, clawing one another nail and fist,” as they looted the living and the dead. The wives and the children of the Turkish officers gathered around Lawrence begging for mercy, and were then pushed out of the way by their husbands, who tried to seize and kiss Lawrence’s feet. He kicked them away “in disgust,” and went on to accept the surrender of a group of Austro-Hungarian officers and NCOs, artillery instructors, one of whom was seriously wounded. Lawrence, who had seen a large Turkish patrol leaving the station, promised that the Turks would be there with help in an hour, but the man died of his wounds, and Lawrence went on to deal with other problems, including a dignified and infirm old Arab woman, whose servant he managed to find—the old woman would later send him a valuable carpet from Damascus as a token of her gratitude. In the meantime, the Bedouin killed all but “two or three” of Lawrence’s Austrian prisoners.

The raiding force evaporated into the desert, each man loading his camel with as much booty as it could carry. In the aftermath of the destruction of the train, Lawrence was obliged to go back and try to rescue Salem, who had been hit by a Turkish bullet, then stripped and left for dead by his Howeitat allies. Lawrence also attempted to retrieve the kits of the two sergeants, and with their help stalled the Turks by blowing up the remaining ammunition. He took care to finish off “out of mercy” those of the Arabs who were badly wounded, since “the Turks used to kill them in horrible ways.” He returned with the sergeants to Aqaba on September 22, “entering in glory, laden with all manner of precious things,” and with his usual care for those who served under him, made sure that once they got back to Cairo each of them was decorated by Allenby, and paid himself for their missing kit.

The account of the raid on the train at Mudawara in Seven Pillars of Wisdomis a literary set piece, one of the great pieces of modern writing about war: dry, businesslike, and ever so slightly ironic in tone, it is brilliantly underplayed, so that at first the only moments of horror the reader feels are when Lawrence enters the smashed carriage full of dead or dying Turks, when he is surrounded by the women pleading for their lives, or when the Austrians are killed after surrendering to him. But reading his account of the incident a second time, one realizes just how gifted a writer Lawrence was. The horror is there, all right, in tiny details, just as it is in the scenes of battle in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or in certain scenes in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The spare, unemotional prose, unlike Lawrence’s much lusher descriptions of landscapes and people, does not hide the reality of the incident—the dead and dying Turks; the shooting of the Arab wounded; the noise, smoke, bloodshed, fear, carnage, and wild looting, all of it over and done with in less than ten minutes in the implacable desert heat. The scene is a small masterpiece, like a sketch by Goya. Lawrence does not tell us what he felt, and does not for a moment try to present himself as heroic or sympathetic; nor does he attempt to infuse the scene with glory, or shock the reader with the blood and gore of battle. Painstakingly, he simply attempts to tell the reader exactly what happened.

Shortly afterward Lawrence wrote to Frank Stirling, a fellow intelligence officer in Cairo who would himself go on to become one of the British army’s boldest adventurers and guerrilla leaders, and to carve out his own fame in both world wars (and in between them) as Colonel W. F. Stirling, DSO, MC, and also to write a lively account of his life in a memoir aptly entitled Safety Last. Lawrence wrote to him: “I hope this sounds the fun it is. … It’s the most amateurishly Buffalo-Billy sort of performance.” But that was intended to appeal to Stirling, a man straight out of A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Featherswho was never happier than when bullets were whizzing past his head, and who would, oddly enough, become an adviser on the first attempt to make a film of Lawrence’s desert campaign, and live on to survive being shot six times by a Palestinian terrorist. ^*

Lawrence wrote about the attack on the train at Mudawara in a very different spirit to his old friend Leeds at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with whom he had no need to posture as a hero from Boy’s Own:“I hope when this nightmare ends that I will wake up and become alive again. This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them, and know you have done hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can …”

Many of those who have written about Lawrence have felt the need to decide between these two very different ways of looking at warfare, and come to some conclusion about which one represents the authentic Lawrence: the self-congratulatory but faintly self-mocking heroic mode, unshocked by bloodshed; or the bitterly self-critical mode, with its deep sense of guilt about his own efficiency as a killer, and his fear that he has crossed a moral line and can never recross it to return to normal life. Of course allowance must be made for the fact that Lawrence, perhaps more than most people, altered the style of his letters to suit the recipient—indeed, even his most casual letters are artfully written to please; thus the tone of his letters to Bernard Shaw is radically different from that of his letters to Charlotte Shaw, for example. Then too, Lawrence had an eerie ability to adopt or project the appropriate version of himself for different people: thus he presented himself to Colonel Stirling, or to General Allenby, and indeed to most professional soldiers of whatever rank, as a daring and efficient soldier untroubled by the inevitable horrors of war, with the traditional British stiff upper lip of their class. To the more sensitive Storrs, he presented himself as a much more reflective and intellectual figure, a reluctant warrior. Later, to admirers such as the Shaws, Robert Graves, or Siegfried Sassoon, he emphasized his guilt and suffering; and to hardheaded political realists such as Winston Churchill, he stressed his own version of hardheaded political realism. Lawrence, like an experienced seducer, had a different persona for everyone whose affection or admiration he wished to conquer (toward those whom he did not wish to conquer he could be downright rude), and yet no persona of his was false—they all coexisted within him, and fought for dominance. Hence the confusion of most professional soldiers who had known and admired him during the war, such as Colonel A. P. Wavell (later Field Marshal the Earl Wavell, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, PC), at the many controversies surrounding Lawrence after the war, and indeed after his death, as well as the very different portraits of Lawrence drawn in the early biographies of him by authors who knew him well, and to whose books he contributed. Liddell Hart, Lowell Thomas, and Robert Graves might as well have been writing about three completely different people, Liddell Hart presenting the reader with a military genius, Thomas presenting a flamboyant and romantic scholar-hero, and Graves presenting a heroic adventurer in the tradition of Burton and Gordon.

Lawrence wrote of himself, “He who gives himself to the possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, selling himself to a brute,” a harshly self-depreciatory comment on his service among the Arabs; but he who alters his personality at will to appeal to everybody from illiterate Bedouin tribesmen to Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau, or from RAF aircraftmen to Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO, is surely no better off. Lawrence’s chameleonlike ability to present different aspects of himself to different people has, over the years, led to confusion about who he was at the core and what he accomplished, and indeed created a whole anti-Lawrence school of history and biography, which is by no means confined to the Middle East, where his role in the Arab Revolt is consistently diminished in importance, for obvious reasons. But as those who knew him best, particularly his surviving brothers, constantly pointed out, Lawrence himself in fact changed very little, if at all, from his Oxford years to his years of fame, and remained recognizablythe same person. Indeed in his letters to Hogarth there is never a hint of affectation: the tone is consistent from Lawrence’s early forays to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with potsherds to Hogarth’s death in 1927, and in his letters to other people about Hogarth afterward. Here, if anywhere, is the real Lawrence—here and in his letters to his family, his correspondence with Charlotte Shaw, and much of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The successful attack on the train at Mudawara led Lawrence to plan a series of attacks on the Turkish railway, cutting it often, and just badly enough to keep the Turks’ attention focused on it, but never so badly or for so long that they might be tempted to give up their hold on Medina. Some of these attacks he carried out personally—using high explosives to damage the railway became something between an obsession and a hobby for Lawrence in the autumn of 1917—but increasingly the Arabs, taught by British instructors, could do much of this demolition work themselves, though it did not give them the pleasure, or the profit, of looting trains. Lawrence, who had eagerly absorbed everything that Major Garland, the demolitions expert, had taught him, encouraged them to create “tulips,” using small amounts of explosive to blow up the rails, which then twisted in the air in a tulip shape. He also urged them to concentrate on blowing up the curved tracks, since these were in short supply and gave the Turks more trouble to replace. The Arab raiding parties could blow up miles of undefended track in desolate areas of the desert, keeping Turkish repair crews busy, and occasionally picking off a few soldiers when they came to repair the track.

In the meantime, Allenby was drawing up his plans, determined to succeed where generals Maxwell and Murray had failed. He replaced the staff with men of his own, bringing his own chief of staff over from France, and adding to it Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, an immensely tall, thin Coldstreamer, who was Lawrence’s kind of soldier—a banker, a poet, and a Greek scholar, with a surprising gift for unconventional tactics, given his conventional appearance. At first, he and Lawrence did not see eye to eye—"Dawnay,” Lawrence remarked, “was a cold shy mind,gazing on our efforts with a bleak eye, always thinking, thinking"—but each man came to appreciate the other’s special skills, and to overlook the contrast between Dawnay’s perfect military appearance and Lawrence’s habit of appearing out of nowhere barefoot and in flowing white robes.

A general who had made his name carrying out frontal attacks against the Germans on the western front, in the style approved and demanded by General Sir Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the BEF, Allenby nevertheless decided not to repeat the frontal attacks against Gaza that had failed under Maxwell and Murray. Instead, he would feint a frontal attack against Gaza, which was where the Turks would expect it, and support it with heavy artillery and a naval bombardment, while at the same time sending the bulk of his forces, led by the British and imperial cavalry, far to the right to attack Beersheeba and capture intact the vital wells there, then turn west and roll up the Turkish line from Beersheba to the coast. Alan Dawnay’s older brother Guy, on Allenby’s staff, was an enthusiast for “dirty tricks” in warfare, despite a formal manner and appearance. He busied himself building roads designed to mislead the Turks about the direction of the attack, raising dust by moving phantom divisions and corps, and he sent Major Richard Meinertzhagen, a soldier almost as unconventional as Lawrence himself, riding out too close to the Turkish lines to trick the Turks. As he galloped for home under fire Meinertzhagen dropped a satchel containing a forged set of maps and orders encouraging the Turks to expect that the attack on Gaza would be preceded by a feint toward Beersheba, and giving a date for the attack several days later than it would actually take place. Meinertzhagen, for some time a rival of Lawrence’s, was a very different kind of man: tall, violent, a world-famous ornithologist48 who took great pleasure in bashing in the heads of cornered Germans with his “African knobkerri” instead of taking them prisoner, and who, unlike Lawrence, enjoyed deceiving his friends as much as his enemies. He and Lawrence eventually became friends of a kind, but neither altogether trusted the other.

THE NORTHERN THEATER

While Lawrence was eager to help Allenby’s attack, he had his own goal in mind: “the navel,” as he called the vital junction of “the JerusalemHaifa, Damascus-Medina railways … the only common point of all their own fronts,” the town of Deraa. He was convinced that he could seize Deraa, and thereby cut all Turkish lines of communication and supply, and that once he had it, Damascus would fall to the Arabs like a ripe fruit, before the British or, more important, the French could reach it. His great concern was that there would be only one chance to do it, for it involved persuading the Syrians to rise against the Turks; but the Syrians were not Bedouin who could retreat back into the desert and strike again; they were town dwellers, farmers, people with fixed abodes and families in place. If Feisal authorized them to rise in his name and was unable to hold Deraa or Damascus, the Turkish reprisals would be cruel, savage, and brutal, and directed against people and families who had nowhere to flee. There was no margin for error—the risings must take place to coincide with Allenby’s attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line, but Allenby was still an untried factor, commanding troops who had twice failed to take Gaza. In the end, Lawrence reached the decision that it was too risky, and put Deraa in the back of his mind—though his strategic interest in the town and his decision to examine its railroad yard with his own eyes would lead very soon to the single greatest crisis of his life.

Instead, he decided to use what forces he had to attack the vital Turkish bridges at Yarmuk. The railway from Deraa to Haifa, Jerusalem, Gaza, and El Arish passed through the steep, winding valley of the Yarmuk River from a point about twenty miles east of Deraa to the southern tip of Lake Tiberias, and followed the twisting turns of the river as closely as possible, crossing and recrossing it where necessary “on a series of identical steel bridges each fifty metres, one hundred and sixty-two feet, in span.” Of these bridges, the farthest west and the farthest east, numberstwo and thirteen, would be the most difficult to repair—indeed impossible to repair in any reasonable length of time. If either of the two bridges was destroyed at the same time as Allenby’s attack, the Turks holding the Gaza-Beersheba lines would be instantly cut off from supplies and reinforcements from Damascus, and forced to retreat—and the retreat would almost certainly turn into a rout if at the same time the population of Syria rose against them. A complete and decisive victory over the Turks could occur as soon as early November 1917, with incalculable effects on the war on the western front and in Russia.

Allenby gave Lawrence his blessing for the operation, which he requested should take place on November 5, “or one of the three following days,” to coincide as closely as possible with his own attack. As at Aqaba, Lawrence’s advantage was that the Turks didn’t think it was possible, so the bridges were lightly guarded. Still, Lawrence would need to march his force 320 miles across the desert from Aqaba to Azrak, make that his base of operations, then cover more than 100 miles from Azrak to Yarmuk undetected, over rough terrain, securing the assistance of tribes along the way, any of which might prefer to sell their knowledge of the raid to the Turks. For that matter, any of those who rode with Lawrence could betray the raid. Though he writes about it almost without emotion, he was proposing to ride deep into country that was tightly held by the Turks, where there were plenty of people who were waiting for a British victory before committing themselves, and not a few who preferred a Muslim master to a European, Christian one.

Given the elaborate steel structure of the bridges he hoped to destroy, Lawrence appealed to the gunners on board HMS Humber, who made him up a network of canvas straps and buckles to quickly attach “a necklace of blasting gelatine” around the key girders. Since destroying the bridges would be a more precise job than destroying a train, the chief engineer at Aqaba, C. E. Wood, an officer of the Royal Engineers, agreed to come along, although he had been wounded in the head in France, was “unfit for active service,” and had never ridden a camel. In case Lawrence was wounded or killed, Wood would act as his deputy and place thecharges. Lawrence’s friend from the Arab Bureau, George Lloyd, MP, who was visiting Aqaba, agreed to come along part of the way, more as a companion for Lawrence and out of curiosity than for any practical reason.

Lawrence added a company of Muslim Indian cavalrymen as a machine gun section, under the command of Jemadar ^*Hassan Shah; a carefully picked bodyguard of his own; and his two riotous young servants, Farraj and Daud, whom he described as “capable and merry on the road,” but whom most others seemed to find troublesome, insolent, and too fond of practical jokes. Childhood friends, Farraj and Daud seem to have filled a role somewhere between body servant and court jester, and shared an intense and feudal loyalty to Lawrence.

A latecomer to the group, and something of a question mark, was Emir Abd el Kader, grandson and namesake of the man who had fought against the French occupation of his native Algeria from 1830 to 1847, and took refuge in the Ottoman Empire after his defeat. The great Abd el Kader had been an authentic hero throughout the Muslim world, and indeed was admired by many outside it. The French occupation of Algeria and the suppression of the Algerian insurgency had been lengthy, bloody, and violent, a protracted scorched-earth policy involving the destruction of villages, crops, and livestock. Against this, Abd el Kader fought a brilliantly conducted guerrilla war, and demonstrated a capacity for the chivalrous gesture altogether lacking in his French enemies. Many in Europe and America had regarded him as a hero, and once he reached Damascus his friends included many Europeans, including the British explorer and translator of that notorious classic of Victorian pornography The Book of the Thousand Nights and One NightSir Richard Burton, and Burton’s wife Isabel.

Abd el Kader lived on to save thousands of Christians from massacre at the hands of the Druses, to become a Freemason, and, ironically, to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor by France, as well as being honored by Abraham Lincoln and having a town in America named after him—Elkader, Iowa. The family lived on in Damascus, and a number of Abd el Kader’s loyal followers, either exiled by the French or fleeing Algeria as refugees, also settled in the Ottoman Empire, many of them in villages not far from the bridges Lawrence planned to destroy.

The grandson of Abd el Kader seems to have had from the beginning something of what we would now call a love-hate relationship with Lawrence. Later on, when writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence would describe him as “an Islamic fanatic, half-insane with religious enthusiasm, and a most violent belief in himself"; but there was no shortage of Islamic fanatics in the Arab Revolt, and King Hussein had been impressed enough by Abd el Kader when the latter visited Mecca to give him a blood-red banner and his blessing. Whatever his father thought, Feisal did not hide his own doubts about Abd el Kader from Lawrence. But Lawrence—a man who certainly shared “a violent belief in himself"—seems to have been more impressed with Abd el Kader than he was later willing to admit, and believed that this famous name would be useful in rallying the descendants of the Algerian exiles to the revolt when he got to the Yarmuk River.

Lawrence set off from Aqaba on October 24, and at first made slow progress—not surprisingly, given the number of people he had with him who were new to camel riding, which involves not only getting used to a completely different gait from that of a horse, but also accustoming oneself to the equivalent of a lady’s sidesaddle. Some of his party fell behind and got lost, while Lawrence rode on at a leisurely pace chatting pleasantly with Lloyd—perhaps a mistake, since he might have done better to cultivate the excitable Abd el Kader, whose dislike of Europeans and contradictory desire to be accepted as Lawrence’s companion and equal were both strong. Lloyd was a man Lawrence liked, and it is revealing that their conversation involved many of the things that were on Lawrence’s mind at the time: the exact text of the Sykes-Picot agreement, which neither Feisal nor his father had yet seen; Lawrence’s misgivings about his meeting in Cairo with the Zionist agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn, leader of a British spy ring in Palestine, who had expressed the intention of acquiring “the land rights of all Palestine from Gaza to Haifa,” a position that even then Lawrence recognized would cause many problems (the Balfour Declaration was just about to be published in London, though neither Lloyd nor Lawrence knew about it); even the basic question of whether the Allies would be justified in partitioning the Arab lands without the consent of the inhabitants. Lloyd would later express his fear that Lawrence was taking too great a risk—Lawrence planned to use his Indian machine gunners to fight the guards on the bridges and thus keep the Turks’ attention fixed elsewhere while he laid the explosive charges, and his plans for escaping back to Azrak after the bridges had been blown seemed to Lloyd to leave too much to chance. Lloyd wanted Lawrence to ride a fast horse for his escape, but Lawrence was no horseman—an unusual gap in his father’s attempt to provide his sons with knowledge of his own gentlemanly pursuits, like sailing and shooting, presumably because riding lessons for five boys would have been too expensive.

In the event, the stragglers eventually joined the main party in dribs and drabs, and they camped for the night in the extravagant landscape of Wadi Rumm, with its towering multicolored cliffs, where they were joined the next day by Abd el Kader, accompanying Sharif Ali ibn Hussein of the Harith and his men. This was not a good mixture; Abd el Kader may have resented being separated from Lawrence’s party, and the two men were arguing furiously when they arrived, since Abd el Kader also resented the amount of attention paid to Sharif Ali. This was inevitable; Ali was a legendary figure, both as a warrior and as a leader, who “could outstrip a trotting camel on his bare feet, keep his speed over half a mile, and then vault with one hand into the saddle, holding his rifle in the other,” as well as kneel down, put his arms on the ground, and rise to his feet lifting two men, one standing on each of his hands. Lawrence described him with admiration as “impertinent, headstrong, conceited … reckless [and] impressive,” all adjectives which might have been applied to himself, except perhaps “conceited.”

In Lawrence’s account, the long journey from Aqaba to Azrak seemsmore like a sightseeing tour than a hardship, but they were still moving slowly day by day in deference to the saddle-sore Indians and British, and eating what were by Bedouin standards lavish feasts: rice cooked specially to Lawrence’s taste by Farraj and Daud, and bully beef (the British army’s equivalent of canned corned beef) and biscuits for the rest of the British. Their route was not without danger; as they crossed the railway it took them past Turkish blockhouses, close enough so that Lawrence called a halt and sent Lloyd’s soldier-servant to climb up the pole and cut the telegraph wires. This created another grave problem for the Turks, since it obliged them to use radio messages, which the British could intercept and decode. In the distance, Lawrence could hear Turkish rifle and machine gun fire, a sign that Abd el Kader and Ali were encountering difficulties as they crossed the railway line a few miles away.

The next morning Lawrence continued to ride north, parallel to the railway line, so that he was able to give the train coming south from Maan an ironic, cheerful wave, as if he led a body of harmless, friendly Bedouin rather than a band of heavily armed train destroyers. Then they turned slightly to the west, away from the tracks, until they reached the flat plains around El Jefer, where they found Auda Abu Tayi uncomfortably camped.

Auda had been obliged to send his tents, his womenfolk, and his herds deeper into the desert, out of range of Turkish aircraft, and was living in a makeshift tent, really more of a rough lean-to in the brush, and quarrelling bitterly with his Howeitat tribesmen over the wages they claimed they had not been paid. He served his guests a feast of rice, meat, and dried tomatoes—even the abstemious Lawrence, who was usually indifferent to food, commented that it was “luscious"—but it seemed to Lawrence unlikely that Auda or his men would be in a mood to follow him to the Yarmuk gorge to blow up a bridge, with no prospect of loot. As they were drinking coffee, a cloud of dust was reported on the horizon from the direction of Maan, and assumed to be a regiment of mounted Turks venturing out to attack them. Auda quickly ordered his tents struck; Lawrence had his camels led into shallow gullies, and made to kneel tokeep them out of sight; and Jemadar Shah deployed his Indian machine gunners with their Vickers and Lewis guns among the thornbushes. In the event, the dust cloud turned out to be Abd el Kader and Ali ibn el Hussein and his men arriving, so the tent was put back up and a second meal prepared. “They had lost two men and a mare in the shooting on the railway in the night,” Lawrence noted, without surprise.

The next day Lloyd left to ride back from Auda’s encampment to Aqaba with his soldier-servant, who was suffering from sunburn and opthalmia (as well as wood splinters in his hands and legs, from climbing the telegraph pole); Lawrence immediately missed Lloyd’s company, as he went on to more “war, tribes and camels without end.” Camels were a constant preoccupation. Once the Bedouin were encamped somewhere, they sent the camels far off to graze, so there were none close by Auda’s encampment for Lloyd to ride back to Aqaba—one senses also, reading between the lines of Lawrence’s account, that Auda and the Howeitat were not in a generous or cooperative mood, and were making difficulties even over such a small matter as the loan of a couple of camels for a British member of Parliament.

Lawrence needed to keep the Howeitat reasonably happy—they had supposed optimistically that the capture of Aqaba was the triumphant climax of their part in the war, rather than the beginning of a longer and more difficult campaign—since they were the first rung in the ladder of tribes that was to take him from Aqaba to Yarmuk. He therefore attempted to make peace between Auda and the tribesmen, and to urge them on to one more big effort. Finally, near midnight, Auda held up his camel stick for silence, and they heard from far away a noise “like the mutter of a distant, very lowly thunderstorm.” It was October 27, and Allenby’s attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line had begun with a prolonged artillery barrage against Gaza.

The sound of the guns had a strong effect on the Howeitat—here, at last, was some sign that the British were prepared to fight—and Lawrence remarked that the atmosphere in the camp became “serene and cordial,” in contrast to that of the previous night. However, as Lawrence was aboutto mount his camel, Auda leaned close, brushed his beard against Lawrence’s ear, and whispered, “Beware of Abd el Kader.” There were too many people around for Auda to expand on this warning, and it is notable that even in his own camp, Auda did not feel able to speak freely. As in the French Resistance movement in World War II, treachery, double-dealing, and betrayal were facts of everyday life—Lawrence was behind the enemy lines from the moment he set foot out of Aqaba, and at the mercy of anybody who wanted to claim a reward or curry favor with the Turks. In any case, since he would need Abd el Kader once he arrived at Yarmuk if he stuck to his original plan, he seems to have decided to ignore Auda’s warning—or it may be that he thought Abd el Kader was more of a buffoon than a threat.

The sound of the big guns firing on Gaza urged Lawrence on to greater speed and greater risks if he was to fulfill his promise to Allenby. The distance from Jefer to Azrak was nearly 150 miles, across flinty desert, broken only by steep, rocky escarpments and dry wadis; even on a modern map of the Middle East it is shown as a vast empty area, bisected only by oil pipelines. On the British War Office map of 1917 it is shown as beige-colored blank space, meaning that no European had ever surveyed it, or even seen it. Lawrence’s Indian machine gunners could do at best thirty or thirty-five miles a day, so he was already falling behind schedule. From the way he writes about the journey in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he might seem to have been enjoying the scenery, but inwardly he must have been seething with impatience.

No matter how empty the desert looked to a European, it was full of hostile strangers. At one point, near Beir, Lawrence’s group came under attack from raiders firing indiscriminately over their heads. These turned out to be Suhkuri of the Beni Sakhr tribe, “a dangerous gang,” as Lawrence described them; once they had ceased firing, at the sight of Ali, they explained that it was an immemorial Beni Sakhr custom to shoot at all strangers. Though these rough, surly customers were distinctly unfriendly, Lawrence and Ali went to the trouble of putting them at their ease, and their chief eventually arrived and put on a tribal show by way ofapology. The show was a rough equivalent of a Moroccan fantasia, in which the tribesmen rode around Lawrence’s group at a full gallop on their horses, firing their rifles into the air and shouting at the top of their voices, “God give victory to our Sharif!” in honor of Ali, and, “Welcome Aurens, harbinger of victory!” to Lawrence—perhaps merely a sign that his reputation was firmly established as a man with gold sovereigns to distribute.

One senses, in Lawrence’s description, how strained and fixed his smile must have been, both because of the delay and because of the danger of being hit by a stray bullet. When the Beni Sakhr finally stopped raising the dust and wasting ammunition, Abd el Kader, apparently infuriated by their hailing of Ali and Lawrence, and not of him, and eager to demonstrate that he could put on as good a show, mounted his mare and rode around in circles, as in a dressage ring, followed by his seven servants, firing into the air with his rifle, until the Beni Sakhr chief asked that Lawrence and Ali put a stop to this before one of his own men was shot. This was not, as it happened, a remote possibility. Abd el Kader’s brother, Emir Mohammed Said el Kader, “held what might well be the world’s record for three successive fatal accidents with automatic pistols in the circle of his Damascus friends,” according to Lawrence. This had led Ali Riza Pasha, the governor of Damascus, to remark, “There are three things notably impossible: one, that Turkey win this war; one, that the Mediterranean become champagne; one, that I be found in the same place with Mohammed Said, and he armed.”

As Lawrence continued on across the desert toward Azrak, he still heard the thunder of the British guns, louder now. On October 31 “some 40,000 troops of all arms,” were on the move to attack Beersheba, after an intense four-day artillery barrage, which had convinced Kress von Kressenstein that Allenby was about to launch another full-scale assault on Gaza. By the end of the day, after intense fighting and a brilliant and daring cavalry charge by the Fourth Australian Light Horse Brigade, whose troopers not only swept over two lines of Turkish trenches at the gallop, but then “dismounted and cleaned up with the bayonet thetrenches over which they had passed,” the Turkish left simply collapsed. “General Allenby’s plan to mislead his enemy had been entirely successful"; he had taken Beersheba and, more important, the wells there, before the Turks were able to dynamite them. Fierce fighting would continue over the next few days, but the Gaza-Beersheba line, which had resisted the British since 1914, was broken, and the only question remaining was where—and if—the Turks could reestablish a line in Palestine.

At every stop on the way to Azrak, Lawrence received more disturbing news about the strength and disposition of the Turks in the Yarmuk gorge, from tribesmen and their chiefs who were reluctant to join him. There were three routes he could take, but as the paramount sheikh of the Serahin explained to Lawrence, none of them was good.

In one place the Turks had sent large groups of military woodcutters (wood was a constant preoccupation, since the Turkish locomotives south of Damascus were fueled by wood, it being impossible to add a further burden to the already overtasked railway system by shipping large amounts of coal), and Lawrence could not hope “to slip through undetected.” In another place—Tell el Shehab—the villagers were enemies of the Serahin “and would certainly attack them in the rear"; in addition, the ground would turn muddy in the event of rain, and the camels would then be unable to cross it to get back to the desert. Finally, the villages of the Algerian descendants in the Jaulan that Abd el Kader claimed to control would certainly be hostile, and “nothing would persuade [the Serahin] to visit the one under the guidance of the other.” Lawrence could not go forward without the Serahin—they were the last major tribe on his way—so he gave them a rousing speech, which won them over for the moment. The next day they marched for Azrak, where a Roman legion had once been garrisoned, leaving behind it in the desert monuments dedicated to Emperor Diocletian, and where “the ruins of the blue fort on its rock above the rustling palms” were “steeped in an unfathomable pool of silence and past history,” an Arab Camelot of legends, mythic heroes, and “lost kingdoms.”

Romantic as the legends surrounding Azrak might be, it was here that Abd el Kader and his servants slipped away from the group. Lawrence had no doubt that Abd el Kader would betray him to the Turks; an equally difficult problem was that without him, two of the three approaches to the Yarmuk were essentially closed off, leaving only Tell el Shehab, from which a retreat might be impossible, and where the troops guarding the bridge would now be on the alert—for Abd el Kader knew all of Lawrence’s plans. At this point, Lawrence had no choice but to go forward to Tell el Shehab—indeed, the only surprise is that he managed to so inspire the doubtful Serahin tribesmen that they went forward with him.

Yarmuk was a two-day ride from Azrak, and during those two days Lawrence’s nerves and patience were further stretched by the need to pass judgment on two of his men who had tried to shoot each other in a quarrel while out hunting gazelle. Pushed once again into a position where only he could make a judgment without causing a blood feud, Lawrence ordered “that the right thumb and forefinger of each should be cut off,” the traditional punishment. The fear of this drove the two men to make peace, in token of which each man was beaten around the head with the sharp edge of a dagger, so that the painful scar should become a permanent reminder of their obligation not to renew the quarrel. Under the circumstances Lawrence was lucky that a scouting party sent out by the Turks just missed his men as they were about to water their camels and fill their water skins for the last time before the ride to the bridge. They faced a ride of forty miles; then the laying of the charges; and, after the bridge was demolished, another forty miles of hard riding back into the desert—all of it to be done in the thirteen hours of darkness.

Some measure of just how dangerous the operation was, even had Abd el Kader not betrayed Lawrence, can be gleaned from the concern of Hogarth in Cairo, who wrote to his wife, apparently not mindful of censorship, or in a position to ignore it, “I only hope TEL will get back safe. … If he comes through it is a V.C.—if not—well, I don’t care to think about it.”

Hidden as best he could manage in a hollow by the railway line, Lawrence made a drastic, last-minute decision to rely on speed rather than force. The Indian machine gunners were still slow and clumsy riders, sohe picked the six of them who were the best riders, and their officer, and reduced his firepower to one Vickers machine gun. He weeded out the least enthusiastic of the Arabs, particularly among the Serahin, whose zeal for the operation, never great to begin with, was rapidly diminishing; and with the help of Wood, who was to remain close by in case Lawrence was killed or wounded, he removed all the explosive from its wrapped packages, kneading it all into thirty-pound lumps, then placing each lump in a white sack that one man could carry downhill in the dark under fire. The fumes from the explosive gave both Lawrence and Wood a severe headache.

At sunset, Lawrence set off with his much-reduced company, and rode through the darkness, “very miserably and disinclined to go on at all.” Along the way they bumped into terrified nocturnal travelers—a peddler and his two wives, a shepherd who opened fire on them, a Gypsy woman, a stray camel—and saw the flares of Deraa station, lit up for army traffic. The going in the dark was slow and difficult—this was not desert; it was cultivated land, and the camels “sank fetlock in,” and began to stumble, slip, and labor, as a steady drizzle started to turn the ground to mud, just as the Serahin had warned. Shortly after nine o’clock they halted before a band of pitch darkness, with the sound of a waterfall in their ears—they had reached Yarmuk gorge.

They dismounted and made their way down a steep bank, gripping with their toes in the slippery mud—the reluctant Serahin chosen to carry the bags of explosive were particularly nervous, since a stray shot could set it off—and set off toward the bridge. They halted about 300 yards from it. Lawrence could look down at it from the edge of the gorge through his binoculars, and could clearly see a sentry standing in front of a fire, and a guard tent, on the far side. Followed by the “explosive-porters” he made his way down a steep construction path to where the bridge abutted, the river running far below it. All he had to do now was to climb the latticework of steel beams that supported the bridge, fasten each thirty-pound bag of explosive where it belonged, place the fuses and wires—all of this in the dark, without alerting the sentry—and then makehis way with the wires back to where Wood waited with the exploder. If the sentry heard anything, the Indians were to rake the guard tent with their Vickers.

This daring and ambitious plan was thwarted at the last minute when one of the Indian machine gunners, slipping on the steep path down to the bridge, dropped his rifle. The Turkish sentry opened fire in return, blindly, in the dark; the Turkish guards came rushing out of their tent and opened fire; and the terrified “explosive-porters” dropped their sacks, which fell down the steep gorge toward the river, where it would obviously be impossible to retrieve them.

The retreat from the bridge was grim—every village on the way opened fire as Lawrence and his party passed it in the night, this being the standard practice when strangers were about. Also, the Serahin, angered by something Lawrence had said about their cowardice in dropping the explosives, paused to attack a group of peasants returning home late from the market at Deraa, stripping them of everything, including their clothes, and setting off from all sides outraged screams and volleys of rifle fire.

However sick at heart Lawrence might be at his failure, his Arabs were determined to come home with something in the way of loot; and since there was still one sack of explosive left, they wanted to blow up a train. Lawrence seems to have felt that this was unwise. For one thing, he had decided to send the machine gunners back to Azrak accompanied by Wood. (He hoped that Wood could enforce peace between the Indians and the Arabs, who hated each other even though both groups were Muslims.) Also, the party had run through its rations, having expected to dash back to Azrak once the bridge was blown, and so was not prepared for the day or two it might take to find a suitable place on the railway line and wait for a train. Still, Lawrence himself had no wish to return to Azrak without having accomplished anything.

He selected a stone culvert, in which he carefully concealed his bag of explosive, though he was hampered by the fact that he had only sixty yards of insulated cable with him—it was in short supply in Egypt—andwould be uncomfortably close to the explosion when it occurred. Before the exploder could be attached, a train of freight cars went by, and Lawrence huddled, “wet and dismal,” unable to blow them up. It rained hard, soaking the Arabs, but also discouraging the Turkish railway patrols from looking too hard at the ground as they went by, within a few yards of where Lawrence was hiding behind a tiny bush. The next to arrive was a troop train, and as it went by he pushed down the handle of the exploder, but nothing happened. As the carriages clanked by—three coaches for officers and eighteen open wagons and boxcars for the troops—he realized that he was now sitting in full view only fifty yards away from the train. Officers came out onto the little platforms at either end of their carriage, “pointing and staring.” Lawrence feigned simplicity and waved at them, aware that he made an unlikely figure of a shepherd in his white robes, with twisted gold and crimson agalwound around his headdress. Fortunately, he was able to conceal the wires and get away when the train drew to a stop and some of the officers got out to investigate—he “ran like a rabbit uphill into safety,” and he and his Arabs spent a cold, hungry, wet, sleepless night in a shallow valley beyond the railway. In the morning, Lawrence managed to get a small fire going by shaving slivers off a stick of blasting gelignite, while the Arabs killed one of the weakest camels and hacked it into pieces with their entrenching tools.

Lawrence prepares to blow up a train full of Turkish soldiers and their officers.

Before they could eat the meat, however, the approach of another train was signaled. Lawrence ran 600 yards, breathlessly, back to his tiny bush and pushed the handle of the exploder just as a train of twelve passenger carriages drawn by two locomotives appeared. This time it worked. He blew his mine just as the first locomotive passed over it, and sat motionless while huge pieces of black steel came hurtling through the air toward him. He felt blood dripping down his arm; the exploder between his knees had been crushed by a piece of iron; just “in front of [him] was the scalded and smoking upper half of the body of a man.” Lawrence had injured his right foot and in great pain limped toward the Arabs, caught in the cross fire as the Arabs and the surviving Turks opened fire on each other. He had suffered a broken toe and five bullet grazes, but was pleased, as the smoke cleared, to see that the explosion had destroyed the culvert and damaged both locomotives beyond repair. The first three carriages were badly crushed, and the rest derailed. One carriage was that of Mehmed Jemal Kuchuk Pasha, ^*the general commanding the Turkish Eighth Army Corps, whose personal chargers had been killed in the front wagon and whose car was at the end of the train. Lawrence “shot up” the general’s car, and also his imam, a priest who was thought to be “a notorious pro-Turk pimp” (an unusually savage comment for Lawrence); but there was not much more he could do against nearly 400 men with only forty Arabs, and the surviving Turks, knowing they were under the eye of a general, were beginning to deploy as they recovered from the shock. The Arabs were able only to loot sixty or seventy rifles, some medals, and assorted luggage scattered from the wreckage—enough, however, for them to feel that it was an honorable episode.

Lawrence made an effort to gather up those wounded who could be saved, including one Arab who had received a bullet in the face, knocking out four teeth and “gashing his tongue deeply,” but who still managed to get back on his camel and ride away. Someone had been farsighted enough to lash the bloody haunch of the slaughtered camel to his saddle, so once they were deeper in the desert, they halted and ate their first meal in three days, then rode back to Azrak, “boasting, God forgive us, that we were victorious.”

For Lawrence, this was a humiliating episode. Derailing a general’s train was not the kind of feat he wanted to bring Allenby. He guessed that the constant rain, turning everything to mud, would slow down the British advance in Palestine, and now regretted that he had been hesitant about sparking an Arab rising in Syria and had chosen to go for the Yarmuk bridge instead.

Lawrence took over the old fortress at Azrak, and made it his winter headquarters, so as to reach out toward Syria. Despite the icy cold, rainy weather, which rendered travel difficult, visitors poured in from the north to pledge their homage to Feisal, which Sharif Ali ibn el Hussein was happy to receive on his behalf; but Lawrence was not at his best in enforced idleness, or with the endless obligatory politeness of Arab greetings, or with the memory of his failure at the Yarmuk bridge tormenting him. From the small red-leather notebook in which he wrote down fragments of poetry that caught his attention, he searched for consolation and reread Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth”:

And not through eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light,In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,But westward, look, the land is bright. But it was irony he found, not consolation. Westward, in Palestine, the weather was the same as at Azrak; and since Lawrence could safely leavethe greeting of Syrian dignitaries to Ali, he set out to do a reconnaissance with the swaggering, glamorous Talal el Hareidhin, sheikh of Tafas, “an outlaw with a price upon his head,” who was familiar with the approaches to Deraa. For Deraa still fascinated Lawrence as an objective; if he could take the town and hold it, if only for a few days, he could cut off all railway traffic to Palestine, and as well give the Arab cause a victory that would not only satisfy Allenby, but go a long way toward convincing the British, and perhaps even the French, to accept an independent Arab state in Syria. His mind buzzed with plans to take Deraa, but he needed to see for himself the lay of the land, and above all the strength or weakness of the Turkish garrison there.

He decided to go there himself.

Probably no incident in Lawrence’s life looms larger than Deraa, or is more controversial. His decision to go there is hotly debated, and often criticized, but Lawrence had always been as reckless when it came to his own safety as he was careful of the life of others—indeed he made a point of courting danger—and it is also hard to calculate the degree to which his failure to destroy the bridge at Tell el Shehab weighed on him. His admiration for Allenby was enormous, uncomplicated, and sincere—Allenby’s huge, commanding presence made him seem to Lawrence like a natural feature, something immovable and irresistible, a mountain perhaps; and having failed to keep what he regarded as a promise to Allenby, he felt obligated to provide an acceptable substitute. Capturing Deraa would be as good as destroying the bridge at Tell el Shehab, or even better.

Talal could not have accompanied Lawrence into Deraa, even had he wanted to—he was a dashingly dressed and flamboyant figure, with “a trimmed beard and long pointed moustaches … his dark eyes made rounder and larger and darker by their thick rims of antimony,” who had “killed some twenty-three Turks with his own hand,” and was wanted by the Turks almost as much as Lawrence was. Talal appointed Mijbil, an elderly, ragged peasant, to guide Lawrence through the town, and Lawrence disguised himself by leaving behind his white robes and gold dagger, and wearing instead a stained, muddy robe and an old jacket.

It occurred to Lawrence that Abd el Kader would long since have given the Turks an accurate description of him, but this does not appear to have caused him any concern, though it should have. His intention was simply to walk through the town with Mijbil and see whether it would be better to rush the railway junction first, or to cut the town off by destroying the three railways lines that entered it. They made “a lame and draggled pair” as they sauntered barefoot in the mud toward Deraa, following the Palestine railway line past the fenced-in “aerodrome,” where there was a Turkish troop encampment, and a few hangars containing German Albatros aircraft. Since Lawrence was looking for a way to attack the city from the desert, this approach made sense—the railway bank and the fence were impediments worth noting—but it must also be said that he could hardly have picked anyplace in Deraa more likely to be guarded with some care than a military airfield.

In any case, after a brief altercation with a Syrian soldier who wanted to desert, Lawrence was grabbed roughly by a Turkish sergeant, who said, “The Bey wants you,” and dragged him through the fence into a compound, where a “fleshy” Turkish officer sat and asked him his name. “Ahmed ibn Bagr,” Lawrence replied, explaining that he was Circassian. “A deserter?” the officer asked. Lawrence explained that Circassians had no military service. “He then turned around and stared at me curiously, and said very slowly, ‘You are a liar. Keep him, Hassan Chowish, til the Bey sends for him.'”

Lawrence was led to the guardroom, told to wash himself, and made to wait. With his fair complexion, blond hair, and blue eyes he might, of course, have been a Circassian, and it was no doubt his boyish appearance and size that had attracted unwelcome attention. He himself had always admitted that he could not “pass as an Arab,” but now his life depended on whether he could pass as a Circassian. He was told that he might be released tomorrow, “if [he] fulfilled all the Bey’s pleasure this evening,” which can have left him in little doubt about what was in store for him. Lawrence had the impression that the bey was Hajim (actually Hacim Bey), the governor of Deraa, but he could have been mistaken.

“The garrison commander at Deraa was Bimbashi [Major] Ismail Bey and the militia commander Ali Riza Bey.” It seems unlikely that the governor of Deraa would have lodged in a military compound next to the airfield and the railway yard; and in Turkish the title “bey” had long since lost its original significance of “chieftain” and become a widespread honorific roughly equivalent to the use of “esquire” instead of Mr. in Britain: i.e., a member of the educated professional, officer, or senior civil servant class, a step above “effendi” and a couple of steps below “pasha.”

That evening Lawrence was taken upstairs to the bedroom of the bey, “a bulky man sitting on his bed in a night-gown trembling and sweating as though with fever.” The bey looked him over, and then dragged him down onto the bed, where Lawrence struggled against him as if they were wrestling. The bey ordered Lawrence to undress, and when he refused to, called in the sentry who was posted outside the door, ordered the sentry to strip Lawrence naked, and began “to paw” at him. Lawrence then kneed the bey in the groin. The bey collapsed in pain, then, calling for the other three men of the guard, had him held naked, spat in Lawrence’s face, and slapped his face with one of his slippers, promising “that he would make me ask pardon.” He bit Lawrence’s neck, then kissed him, then drew one of the men’s bayonets and plunged it into Lawrence’s side, above a rib, twisting it to give more pain. Lawrence lost his self-control enough to swear at him, and the bey then calmed himself, and said, “You must understand that I know about you, and it will be much easier if you do as I wish.”

Lawrence feared that the bey had identified him, and much of the horror that was to follow may have been enormously increased by his belief that at the end of the ordeal he would simply be hanged, as well as by his burning conviction that Abd el Kader was responsible for his being stopped in the first place, and by his sense of failure for not destroying the bridge at Tell el Shehab. All this was to become firmly fixed in Lawrence’s mind, and would have unexpected consequences toward the end of the war.

His description of the incident in Seven Pillars of Wisdomis remarkable. Even in moments of horror—such as the attack on the train at Mudawara, with the looting, pillaging, and cutting of throats; or the scalded trunk of a man that landed at his feet when he blew up Jemal Pasha’s train—Lawrence’s style is usually ironic and almost deliberately detached. But he writes about Deraa in an unflinching style that is at once physically detailed, intense, and lurid, almost pornographic, in the manner of William Burroughs or Jean Genet—indeed at certain moments, like the precise and even finicky description of the whip that was used on him, it is reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade, who reveled in such descriptions. It is clear that Lawrence, as in his brilliant, almost pointillistedescriptions of the desert landscape, is determined that the reader will understand exactlywhat he saw and felt. It is the one passage in the book, apart from a few attempts at humor, when he slips out of the skin of a man whose ambition it was to write “a great book,” one that could take its place beside Moby-Dick, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Brothers Karamazov, and relies on his own voice, without literary artifice:

They kicked me to the landing at the head of the stairs, and there threw me on the guard-bench and stretched me along it on my face, pummelling me. Two of them knelt on my ankles, bearing down with their arms on the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists over my head till they cracked, and then crushed them and my ribs against the wood. The corporal had run downstairs, and now came back with a Circassian riding whip, of the sort which gendarmes carried. They were single thongs of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver, with a knob inlaid in black designs) down to a hard point much finer than a pencil.He saw me shivering, partly I think with cold, and made it whistle through the air over my head, taunting me that before the tenth cut I would howl for mercy, and at the twentieth beg for the caresses of the Bey, and then he began to lash me across and across with all his might, while I locked my teeth to endure this thing which wrapped itself like flaming wire about my body. At the instant of each stroke a hard white mark like a railway, darkening, slowly, into crimson, leaped over my skin, and a bead of blood welled up wherever two ridges crossed. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. From the first they hurt more horribly than I had dreamed of and, as always before the agony of one had fully reached me another used to fall, the torture of a series, worked up to an intolerable height.To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I was prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of all my being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, and there clashed terribly together. Somewhere in the place was a cheap clock, ticking loudly, and it troubled me that their beating was not in its time.I writhed and twisted involuntarily, but was held so tightly that my struggles were quite useless. The men were very deliberate, giving me so many, and then taking an interval, during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, play a little with me, and pull my head round to see their work. This was repeated time and again, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. They had soon conquered my determination not to cry, but so long as my will could rule my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful bodily sickness came over me, and choked my utterance.At last when I was completely broken they seemed satisfied. Somehow I found myself off the bench lying on my back on the dirty floor, where I snuggled down, dazed, panting for breath but vaguely comfortable. I had strung myself to learn all pain until I died, and, no longer an actor but a spectator, cared not how much my body jerked and squealed in its sufferings. Yet I knew or imagined what passed about me.I remembered the corporal kicking me with his nailed boot to get me up and this was true, for next day my left side was yellow andlacerated and a damaged rib made each breath stab me sharply. I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This jerked me half-over, screaming, or rather trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. Someone giggled with amusement, but another cried, “Shame, you’ve killed him.” A second slash followed. A roaring was in my head, and my eyes went black, while within me the core of my life seemed to be heaving slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last and indescribable pang.By the bruises, perhaps they beat me further: but I next knew that I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a leg as though to split me apart: while a third astride my back rode me like a horse. Then Hajim called. They splashed water in my face, lifted me to my feet, and bore me, retching and sobbing for mercy, between them to his bedside: but he now threw me off fastidiously, cursing them for their stupidity in thinking he needed a bedfellow streaming with blood and water, striped and fouled from face to heel. They had laid into me, no doubt much as usual: but my indoor skin had torn more than an Arab’s.So the crestfallen corporal, as the youngest and best-looking of the guard, had to stay behind, while the others carried me down the narrow stairs and out into the street. The coolness of the night on my burning flesh, and the unmoved shining of the stars after the horror of the past hour, made me cry again. The soldiers, now free to speak, tried to console me in their fashion, saying that men must suffer their officers’ wishes or pay for it, as I had just done, with still greater suffering.They took me over an open space, deserted and dark, and behind the Government house to an empty lean-to mud and wooden room, in which were many dusty quilts. They put me down on these, and brought an Armenian dresser who washed and bandaged me in sleepy haste. Then they all went away, the last of the soldiers whispering to me in a Druse accent that the door into the next room was not locked.I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed, and a locomotive began to whistle in the station. These and a draining thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Yet the first movement brought anguish: but I struggled to my feet, and rocked unsteadily for a moment, wondering that it was not all a dream, and myself back five years ago in the hospital at Khalfati, where something of the sort had happened to me.The next room was a dispensary, and on its door hung a suit of shoddy clothes. I put them on slowly and clumsily, because of my swollen wrists: and from the drugs chose some tablets of corrosive sublimate, as a safeguard against recapture. The window looked north on to a blank long wall. I opened it, and climbed out stiffly. No one saw me, which perhaps was the reason why I had been shut up in so weak a place.I went timidly down the road towards the village, trying to walk naturally past the few people already astir. They took no notice, and indeed there was nothing peculiar in my dark broadcloth, red fez and slippers: but it was only by restraining myself with the full urge of my tongue silently to myself that I refrained from being foolish out of sheer terror. The atmosphere of Deraa seemed inhuman with vice and cruelty, and it shocked me like cold water when I heard a soldier laugh behind me in the street.By the bridge were the wells, with men and women already about them. A side-trough was free, and from its end I scooped up a little water in my hands, and rubbed it over my face: then drank, which was precious to me: and afterwards wandered aimlessly along the bottom of the valley for some minutes, towards the south, till out of sight of both town and station. So at last was found the hidden approach to Deraa for our future raiding party, the purpose for which Mijbil and myself had come here it seemed so long ago.Further on a Serdi, riding away on his camel, overtook me hobbling up the road towards Nisib. To him I explained that I had business there, and was already footsore. He had pity, and mounted me behind him on his bony camel, to which I clung the rest of the way, learning the feelings of my name saint on his gridiron. The tribe’s tents were just in front of the village, where I found Mijbil and Daher, very anxious about me, and curious to learn how I had fared. Daher had been up to Deraa in the night, and knew by the lack of rumour that the truth about me had not been discovered. I told them a merry tale of bribery and trickery, which they promised devoutly to keep to themselves, laughing aloud at the simplicity of the Turks.We rested there the night, during which time I managed to get along towards the village, and to see the great stone bridge to the north of it, one of the most important in this neighbourhood. Then we took horse, and rode very gently and carefully towards Azrak, without incident, except that on the Giaan el Khunna a raiding party of Wuld Ali let us and our horses go unplundered, when they heard who I was.This was an unexpected generosity, for the Wuld Ali were not yet of our fellowship; and their action revived me a little. I was feeling very ill, as though some part of me had gone dead that night in Deraa, leaving me maimed, imperfect, only half-myself. It could not have been the defilement, for no one ever held the body in less honour than I did myself: probably it had been the breaking of the spirit by that frenzied nerve-shattering pain which had degraded me to beast-level when it made me grovel to it; and which had journeyed with me since, a fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame. When allowance is made for Lawrence’s post-Victorian avoidance of certain words, and for his dislike of the subject of sex in the first place, this is certainly one of the most horrifying descriptions of torture and male rape ever written, made even more horrifying by the knowledge that Lawrence, as so many of those who knew him confirm, hated being touched by anyone, under any circumstances. Even a friendly handshake, a pat on the back, or an affectionate embrace was torture to him, and here he was stripped naked, beaten savagely, fondled, kissed, and eventually buggered, to use the word he avoided using himself, all of it taking place in the shadow of the knowledge that if the bey’s words meant what Lawrence supposed they meant, he would be hanged at the end of it all.

Those who are critical of Lawrence have argued that he exaggerated the incident, or even invented it altogether. But the episode was not improbable—the brutality of the Turks toward their subject races was a known fact, and the practice of anal rape, while by no means restricted to the Turkish soldiery and their officers, was a recognized peril of becoming a prisoner of the Turks in World War I, as in the many earlier Balkan wars—nor was it uncommon; indeed it remains one of the dangers of warfare in the Middle East. Lawrence, given his small size, pale skin, apparent youth, and seemingly delicate body, would have looked like an obvious victim for this kind of treatment (some of the portraits painted of him after the war emphasize the androgynous quality of his features, particularly the lips); indeed it had almost happened to him earlier, before the war, when he and Dahoum were arrested as deserters and imprisoned.

Bearing in mind that no pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdomwere more often revised by Lawrence than those describing the incident at Deraa, or subjected to more criticism and soul-searching by his many literary advisers, including Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster, the reader will have to decide whether they carry conviction or not. There seems no good reason why Lawrence would have invented the incident—on the contrary, it seems more like the kind of thing that he would have suppressed, had he not been determined to tell the whole truth even when it was distasteful and damaging to him. For he does not strain himself to come out of it with credit; it is not just his body but his spirit that was broken, and much of what happened in 1918, and what became of Lawrence later, after the war, would be incomprehensible except for Deraa.

He himself put it best, in 1924, in a letter to Charlotte Shaw, who by then had become a kind of alternative mother figure: “About that night, I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, & wrestled for days with myself-respect. … 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 which we are all born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living & the exercise of my not-contemptible wits & talents.

“You may call this morbid: but think of the offense, and the intensity of my brooding over it for three years. It will hang about me while I live, & afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying ‘Unclean, unclean!’ ”

Considering that the Shaws had what used to be known as un mariage blanc—that is, they were legally married and lived together as man and wife, but Charlotte remained celibate—perhaps nobody could have been better suited to understand Lawrence’s mortification and shame than she, who had all her life refused to have sex, or even to contemplate the possibility of childbirth. In this revulsion toward sex, she and Lawrence were very much alike, except that he had been violated, had given in under the pressure of pain, and had even felt, the ultimate horror, “a delicious warmth, probably sexual … flooding through me … a fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame.”

In short, he had not only been humiliated, tortured, and brutally raped, but to his horror had felt a sexual excitement that made his torturers mock him and filled him with shame. The ultimate abasement is not to be violated, after all, but to enjoybeing violated, and Lawrence had discovered in himself at Deraa just what he had been at such pains all his life to avoid admitting.

Whole books have been written putting Lawrence posthumously on the analyst’s couch, but it is hardly necessary to be a professional psychoanalyst to glean from Lawrence’s description of the incident at Deraa and his later explanation to Charlotte Shaw—they were equally frank about their lives to each other—a fair understanding of what happened, and some sense of why Lawrence felt he had to atone for it. He had failed tolive up to his own standards, impossibly high as they might be—by giving in to pain and fear, by submitting himself to rape as an escape from the pain, and by discovering that despite himself he felt a forbidden sexual excitement that he could not conceal from his torturers.

Those who have doubted the story point out that the governor of Deraa, Hacim Bey, though brutal, was a notorious womanizer, and that if he really knew he had Lawrence in his hands, he would never have dared to let him go. But neither of these things is necessarily so. The bey, as we have seen, could have been one of at least two other Turkish officers in Deraa, and the phrase “I know all about you” could have meant many things. The bey, whoever he was, may have meant, “I know all about what kind of man you are, and what you like, so stop fighting against it"; indeed this is far more likely than that he knew the man standing stripped before him was Major T. E. Lawrence, CB. A Turkish officer who had such a notorious figure as Lawrence in his hands and let him escape would have been court-martialed and shot; besides, there was a substantial reward on Lawrence’s head.

Lawrence limped to safety, still suffering from the toe he had broken while destroying the train; rode back to Azrak; concealed his wounds and what had happened to him; and returned to Aqaba, where “he seemed like a wraith, so white and remote … and crept away into a tent,” and where he learned that Allenby, ahead of schedule, had given the British people what Lloyd George wanted for them as a Christmas present: Jerusalem.

Allenby had not yet entered Jerusalem, however, and he wanted Lawrence to be there when he did.

Years before, in 1898, Kaiser William II had visited Jerusalem, and had caused the Jaffa Gate to be enlarged so that he could ride into the city, in his glittering full uniform. At the time, a wit at the Foreign Office had remarked, “A better man than he entered the city on foot,” and this thought must have occurred to Sir Mark Sykes, ever the imperial stage manager, who telegraphed Allenby from London with the advice todismount, or get out of his automobile, and enter Jerusalem humbly on foot. Very likely Allenby, no mean stage manager himself, had already reached the same conclusion.

The Turks had abandoned Jerusalem, and for many, including Lawrence himself, the taking of the city by British and Commonwealth troops was “the most memorable event of the war.” Allenby, with an unfailing genius for the big event, was determined to make the most of his capture of the Holy City, and left orders at Aqaba that Lawrence was to join him at once. Lawrence, not unnaturally, supposed that Allenby was going to give him hell for his failure at Yarmuk, but an airplane had been sent for him, and he was flown directly to Allenby’s headquarters in the field, north of Gaza, still barefoot and in white robes. To his surprise, the interview with Allenby went better than he had imagined—the breakthrough at Gaza and Beersheba and the fall of Jerusalem had pleased Allenby so much that he didn’t seem to mind about the bridge at Tell el Shehab. He had wanted the Turks to the east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River to be harassed, preoccupied, and disorganized as he advanced from Beersheba, so that he could not be attacked on his right from the desert, and God knows Lawrence had achieved this, and with fewer than 100 armed men.

As a sign of his regard, Allenby insisted that Lawrence should be present as part of his staff when he entered the city, so Lawrence borrowed bits and pieces of uniform from the other staff officers, and resplendent with red staff collar tabs and a major’s crown on each shoulder, he walked behind Allenby on December 11, through the Jaffa Gate and into Jerusalem.

Sykes had originally hoped to write Allenby’s proclamation to the inhabitants of Jerusalem himself, and as a new convert to Zionism he wanted to include a few rousing words about the Balfour Declaration; but after due deliberation by the cabinet, Lord Curzon was asked to draft a more cautious message, merely promising to safeguard “all institutions holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims,” and declaring martial law. Within hours after the city was taken, the pattern of the future was clear: the Ashkenazi Jews were exultant that Allenby had entered the city “on the Maccabean feast of Hanukah,” though this timing had been wholly unintentional; the Arabs complained not only about that, but about their suspicion that the Jews were attempting to “corner the market” in small change; and Picot protested that the right of the French to have their soldiers, and theirs alone, guard the Holy Sepulcher was being ignored. Lawrence wrote his first letter home in more than a month to tell his family that he had been in Jerusalem, adding that he was now “an Emir of sorts, and have to live up to the title,” and that the French government “had stuck another medal” onto him. This medal was a second Croix de Guerre, which he was trying to avoid accepting, no doubt in part because it would surely have involved being kissed on both cheeks by Picot.

Storrs, who had missed the official entry, arrived to take up his surprising new duties as “the first military governor of Jerusalem since Pontius Pilate,” with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. It was in this capacity that Storrs first met Lowell Thomas, the brash American journalist, documentary filmmaker, and inventor of the travelogue. Thomas was a former gold miner, short-order cook, and newspaper reporter with a gift for gab, who had studied for a master’s degree at Princeton, where he also taught, of all things, oratory, and who had been sent by Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton, to make a film that would drum up Americans’ enthusiasm for the war and for their new allies, now that the United States had joined it—an early and groundbreaking attempt at a propaganda film. Thomas, his wife, and the cameraman Harry Chase set off for Europe, but one look at the western front was enough to convince them that nothing there was likely to serve their purpose, or to convince the American public that it was a good idea to send their sons to the war. They went on to Italy, but that was not much better—Italy was locked in battle with the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in circumstances that were almost as grim as the western front, and that would be described perfectly after the war, from firsthand experience, by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. There, however, Thomas learned about General Sir Edmund Allenby’s campaign against the Turks in Palestine, which sounded like more promising material for a film, and particularly for an American public to whom biblical place names—Jerusalem, Gaza, Beersheba, Galilee, Bethlehem—still had more resonance than Verdun, the Somme, or Passchendaele.

Thomas, who had the American go-getter’s ability to move like lightning when his interest (or self-interest) was aroused, quickly had himself accredited as a war correspondent; and he arrived in Jerusalem, with Harry Chase, in time to film Allenby’s entrance into the city—a worldwide scoop. Sometime later, he was buying dates on Christian Street when he saw a group of Arabs approaching. His “curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin, who stood out in sharp relief from his companions. He was wearing an agal, kuffieh, and aba such as are only worn by Near Eastern Potentates. In his belt was fastened the short curved sword of a prince of Mecca, insignia worn by the descendents of the Prophet. … It was not merely his costume, nor yet the dignity with which he carried his five feet three, marking him every inch a king or perhaps a caliph in disguise … [but] this young man was as blond as a Scandinavian, in whose veins flow Viking blood and the cool traditions of fiords and sagas. … My first thought as I glanced at his face was that he might be one of the younger apostles returned to life. His expression was serene, almost saintly, in its selflessness and repose.”

Wisely, Lowell Thomas sought out Storrs (“British successor to Pontius Pilate”), and asked him, “Who is this blue-eyed, fair-haired fellow wandering around the bazaars wearing the curved sword of—?”

Storrs did not even allow Thomas to finish his question. He opened the door to an adjoining room, where, “seated at the same table where Von Falkenhayn had worked out his unsuccessful plan for defeating Allenby, was the Bedouin prince, deeply absorbed in a ponderous tome on archeology. Introducing us the governor said, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia.’ ”

* to be fair, this was also true of Franklin D. roosevelt, and of course vastly more true of Stalin, whose sense of humor was directed at his terrified subordinates, and was distinctly cruel and sinister in tone.

* The lowest estimate for the number of Armenians murdered by the turks in 1915 is somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million.

* Stirling particularly admired Lawrence’s courage and toughness, and was a good judge of both. When told of the attempt on Stirling’s life, an Arab friend remarked incredulously, “Did they really think they could kill Colonel Stirling with only six shots?” ( SafetyLast, 243).

* Jemadarwas the lowest commissioned rank in the indian army, the approximate equivalent of a lieutenant.

* Known as “Jemal the Lesser” to distinguish him from Jemal Pasha.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1918: Triumph and Tragedy

“Good news: Damascus salutes you.” —T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom Two names had come to dominate Cairo,” Ronald Storrs wrote concerning the end of 1917: “Allenby, now striding like a giant up the Holy Land, and Lawrence, no longer a meteor in renown, but a fixed star.” It is worth noting that despite the failure of the attack on the bridge at Yarmuk and the incident at Deraa (about which Lawrence had told nobody except Clayton and Hogarth, both of whom seem to have received a strictly sanitized version of the story), Lawrence’s name was already being placed in conjunction with Allenby’s, as if they were partners, rather than a full general who was the commander in chief and a temporary major who was a guerrilla leader. Lowell Thomas was not the only person to recognize that Lawrence was a great story—perhaps the great story of the war in the Middle East—as well as a genuine hero in a war in which individual acts of bravery were being submerged in the public’s mind by the sheer mass of combatants. People hungered for color, for a clearly defined personality, for a hint of chivalry and panache rather than the endless casualty lists and the sheerhorror of mechanized, muddy, anonymous death on a hitherto unimaginable scale. The desire for a hero was not limited to Great Britain—in Germany it would produce at about the same time the enduring cult of Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, the famous Red Baron, the handsome, daring air ace, commander of the “Flying Circus,” with his bright red Fokker Triplane and his eighty victories.

Lawrence’s cult had started long before his arrival in Jerusalem; indeed it had its beginning among a much more critical group—his fellow soldiers. His flowing robes; his apparent indifference to fatigue, pain, and danger; his ability to lead desert Bedouin; and the fact that he appeared to be fighting a war of his own devising, with no orders from anybody except Allenby—all these gave Lawrence a legendary status well before the arrival of Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase. Lawrence had already mastered the art of seeking to avoid the limelight while actually backing into it—as his friend Bernard Shaw would write, years later: “When he was in the middle of the stage, with ten limelights blazing on him, everybody pointed to him and said: ‘See! He is hiding. He hates publicity.’ ”

Storrs had unwittingly introduced Lawrence to the man who would shortly make him perhaps the world’s first media celebrity and also the media’s victim. This is not the only thing that happened in Jerusalem. Lawrence gleefully records that at an indoor picnic luncheon after Allenby’s entrance into the city, Franзois Georges-Picot announced to Allenby that he would set up a civil administration in Jerusalem, only to be fiercely snubbed by Allenby, who pointed out that the city was under military government until he himself decided otherwise. It was a bad day for Picot, who had been greeted everywhere on his way to Jerusalem (with the amiable Storrs as his traveling companion) as France’s high commissioner for Palestine, and was now reduced to the role of a mere political officer attached to the French mission. To his fury he had been placed next to Brigadier-General Clayton in the order of precedence of those following General Allenby into Jerusalem.

Even more pleasing than this snub to the French was the fact that Allenby had important plans for Lawrence in the next stage of his campaign. Given the weather and the number of casualties he had already sustained, Allenby intended to stay put for two months, and then, in February, advance north from a line drawn from Jerusalem toward Jericho and the mouth of the Jordan River. He wanted Lawrence to bring what was now being rather grandly referred to as the “Arab army” to the southernmost end of the Dead Sea, concentrating at Tafileh, both to discourage the Turks from launching an attack against the flank of the British army, and to cut off the supplies of food and ammunition that the Turks were sending the length of the Dead Sea. Lawrence agreed to this—the area was one where the tribes were friendly to Feisal—and suggested that after Allenby took Jericho, the headquarters and supply base of the “northern Arab army” be moved from Aqaba to Jericho and supplied by rail. He did not mention that this position would make it easier for the Arabs to reach Damascus before the British could get there, and he indulged in a certain amount of flimflam, which may not have fooled a man as astute as Allenby. The “northern Arab army” consisted of Jaafar’s 600 or 800 former Turkish soldiers (their number depends on whom you believe), plus however many Bedouin tribesmen could be persuaded to rally around Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi, but its importance far outweighed its size. The most important points were that the Arab army would henceforth be acting formally as Allenby’s right wing, and that blowing up railway lines and locomotives would now take second place to advancing into Syria. Lawrence was in a position to ask for more mountain guns, camels, automatic weapons, and money. In addition, he requested, and got, the support of Joyce’s armored cars, and a fleet of Rolls-Royce tenders to support them. In his raid from Aqaba to Mudawara to attack the station there, he had remarked on how much of the desert consisted of smooth, flat, baked mud, and it seemed to him certain that a car could be driven across it at high speed, so that as the Arab forces advanced north into Syria the cars would give him vastly increased mobility and firepower.