Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

Shortly after his return to Aqaba he and Joyce would put this to thetest by driving a Rolls-Royce tender equipped with a machine gun across the desert from Guweira to Mudawara, in some places at sixty miles an hour. The trip was so successful that they went back to Guweira; gathered up all the tenders, which carried water, gasoline, spare tires, and rations; and drove back to Mudawara to shoot up the station there, opening up a new phase in desert warfare that would be imitated in the Libyan Desert by the Long Range Desert Group from 1941 to 1943. The cars Lawrence used were not tanks, of course, and he could not use them to attack Turkish fortifications, but they helped to keep the Turks bottled up in their blockhouses and trenches, while the Bedouin rode where they pleased and destroyed stretches of undefended railway.

Lawrence’s experience at Deraa, and the fact that Turks’ price for him, dead or alive, had risen from the Ј100 they would pay for any British officer to “twenty thousand pounds alive or ten thousand dead” after the attack on the general’s train, also persuaded him to enlarge his personal bodyguard. Its members were loyal only to him, “hard riders and hard livers: men proud of themselves and without family,” as he described them, though they were often men whom other Bedouin regarded as troublemakers or worse, “generally outlaws, men guilty of crimes of violence.” Chosen from different tribes and clans so that they would never combine against Lawrence, they were ruled and disciplined with “unalloyed savagery” by their officers. Their flamboyance and their total commitment to “Aurens” raised eyebrows among both the Arabs and the British. “The British at Aqaba called them cut-throats, but they cut throats only to my order,” Lawrence would boast, and they would eventually grow to a force of ninety men, dressed “like a bed of tulips,” in every color of the rainbow except white, which was reserved for Lawrence alone, and armed with a Lewis or Hotchkiss light machine gun for every two men, in addition to each man’s rifle and dagger. This was a protective force far larger than that of any Arab prince at the time, as well as better paid, better armed, and better dressed (at the British taxpayers’ expense), and it confirmed Lawrence’s growing prestige. He also used his bodyguard as shock troops—more than sixty of the ninety would die in combat. They were recklesslyloyal to him, and referred to him as “Emir Dynamite” because of his continuing interest in blowing up trains, rails, and bridges.

Implicit in Allenby’s plans for 1918 was a fundamental change in the tactics of the Arab army from guerrilla skirmishing on the border of the desert to a full-fledged attack by the Arab “regulars” on Turkish-held towns. The Arabs would not only have to fight against Turkish troops, but take ground and hold it—something they had never done before, and that Lawrence had hitherto been determined to avoid. Lawrence saw at once that four small rural towns, which marked the border between cultivated land and the desert, represented the key to the next phase of the march toward Damascus. Maan was too far south, and too heavily garrisoned by the Turks, to interest him. But to its northwest, only a few miles from Petra, lay Shobek, with its store of wood for fueling the railway; the Arabs had taken Shobek once in October for a few days. Tafileh was next, “almost level with the south end of the Dead Sea…. Beyond it lay Kerak, and at the northern end of the Dead Sea, Madeba.” Each of these towns was about sixty miles away from the next, and they formed a chain that the “northern Arab army” might climb up until it made contact with Allenby’s army advancing on the other side of the Dead Sea to take Jericho.

A Turkish attempt to make a sortie out of Maan to protect Shobek had already been repulsed by the Arabs; one Turkish battalion, which lagged behind, had been cut to pieces by the Arabs—a taste of things to come. By January 1918 the Turks were effectively bottled up in Maan again, while the “motor-road” was completed—an astonishing feat in this part of the world—from Aqaba up through Wadi Itm to Guweira, from which the mudflats of the desert stretched out for many miles. Guweira became the advance base of operations. From it, large sections of the railway to Medina were now only an hour’s drive away. The Turks could drive off camel-mounted tribesmen, but there was no way they could defend the railway against armored cars. Lawrence was, in the words of Liddell Hart, “at least a generation ahead of the military world in perceiving the strategic implications of mechanized warfare,” andputting it into effect. Henceforth, cars and trucks began to play almost as important a role in Lawrence’s plans as camel-or horse-mounted Bedouin, and when he finally arrived in Damascus it would be in his own personal Rolls-Royce tender, which he named “Blue Mist,” seated next to a British Army Service Corps driver and surrounded by his own colorful bodyguard.

Few tasks in warfare are more difficult than combining a guerrilla army with a regular one to wage a conventional war, and doing so while continuing to fight. Lawrence hoped to take Tafileh, the most important of these towns, by tackling it “simultaneously from the east, from the south, and from the west.” To do this it would be necessary to take Shobek first, cut the railway line between Maan and Amman, and then attack Tafileh from the east, out of the desert, using a combination of mounted infantry under the command of Nuri as-Said (a future prime minister of Iraq) and whatever tribal levies could be produced by the Abu Tayi and their rivals the Beni Sakhr. The mixture of tribes, of Arabs and British gunners and drivers, not to speak of the overwhelming presence of Auda, was bound to create difficulties. Although this was desert warfare, it was winter; and on the high plateau, more than 3,000 feet above sea level, winds howled in from the Caucasus bringing snow, ice, and freezing temperatures—conditions that were underappreciated in Khartoum, Cairo, and London. Among the regular, uniformed Arab troops, many of whom had been issued only one blanket and were dressed in tropical khaki drill, it would not be uncommon for men to freeze to death during the night; and even among the Bedouin, with their thick, heavy cloaks, men would still suffer frostbite or die.

In the first week of January, Lawrence had enough to keep him busy in Aqaba, as the elements of his plan were put into motion. The Bolshevik Revolution had brought the Sykes-Picot agreement out into the open, and, predictably, it was causing doubts among the Arab leaders. It inspired Jemal Pasha to write to Feisal, proposing “an amnesty for the Arab Revolt,” and suggesting that an Arab state allied to Turkey might be more in the Arabs’ interest than an outcome in which the Allies would carveup the Turkish empire, giving the British Iraq, the French Syria and Lebanon, and the British and the Jews Palestine. Feisal forwarded this letter to Cairo, no doubt as a proof of his loyalty, but Lawrence encouraged him to reply to it, and to keep up a secret correspondence—or perhaps felt unable to prevent this. Even though Arab leaders had already guessed what it contained, the Bolsheviks’ publication of the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement threatened to undermine such trust as had been built up between the Arabs and Britain; and Lawrence, as he was in any case bound to do, no doubt thought it better to let Feisal explore various options. It did not help much that London had finally decided to publicize the Arab Revolt. Bringing his usual white-hot enthusiasm to bear on the subject, Sykes cabled Clayton to “ring off the highbrow line” of dignified press releases about British respect for all faiths in the Holy Land. Sykes wanted a propaganda blitz that would appeal to everyone, from “English church and chapel folk” to “the New York Irish,” not to speak of “Jews throughout the world.” Sounding just like Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, he demanded local color: “Jam Catholics on the Holy Places…. Fix Orthodox on ditto…. Concentrate Jews on full details of colonies and institutes and wailing places[!] … Vox humana on this part.”

Clayton, an experienced and secretive intelligence officer, was hardly the right person to launch this flood of propaganda—on the contrary, his specialty was avoiding reporters—but gradually the British press, whipped on by Sykes, began to focus on the Middle East in the afterglow of the conquest of Jerusalem. Lawrence’s fame began to spread far beyond Cairo and the office of the chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) in London—a fact that would have a major impact on his life less than two months later, when Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase finally arrived in Aqaba to make Lawrence once and for all the central figure in the Arab Revolt and put him and the Arabs, at last, not only on the map but, more important, on film.

Lawrence spent the early days of January composing a long and sensible report on the situation, perhaps intended to take Clayton’s mind off Feisal’s correspondence with Jemal Pasha, though its conclusions aboutSyria were such as to prevent it from being published in the Arab Bulletin; it was circulated only among senior British intelligence officials who could be trusted to keep it out of the hands of the French. Lawrence also dealt with a minor breach of discipline, albeit one that could have had serious repercussions, in a way that makes any careful reader of Seven Pillars of Wisdom realize just how tangled Lawrence’s feelings on the subject of sex and corporal punishment were.

If we bear in mind that the incident at Deraa had happened only six weeks earlier, it is surprising to read that when an Arab youth of seventeen, Ali el Alayan, an Ageyl camel man of his bodyguard, was “caught in open enjoyment of a British soldier,” by which Lawrence seems to have meant that the British soldier had been buggering the Arab or vice versa, Ali was tried in five minutes and sentenced to 100 lashes, as “appointed by the Prophet,” which Lawrence reduced to fifty. The Arab boy “was immediately trussed over a sand-heap, and beaten lustily.” Meanwhile Lawrence told the British soldier, Carson, “a very decent A.S.C.* lad,” that he would have to turn him over to his officer, who was returning to Aqaba the next day. Carson “was miserable at his position"—understandably, since in those days, and indeed through World War II and for some years beyond it, a homosexual act committed by a member of the British armed forces was both a military and a criminal offense.

When the British NCO in charge of the cars, Corporal Driver, appeared and asked Lawrence to hush the matter up for the boy’s sake before their officer returned, Lawrence refused. He was not shocked; nor did he condemn the act morally—"neither my impulses nor my convictions,” Lawrence wrote later, “were strong enough to make me a judge of conduct"—it was simply a matter of Anglo-Arab justice. It was important that there be equity, he told the British corporal. He could not “let our man go free…. We shared good and ill fortune with the Arabs, who had already punished their offender in the case.” The corporal, who was clearly experienced and reasonable, explained that Carson “was only a boy, not vicious or decadent,” and “had been a year without opportunity of sexual indulgence.” He also, though with considerable tact, laid part of the blame on Lawrence, who, for fear of venereal disease, had posted sentries to prevent British troops from visiting the three hardy Arab prostitutes who plied their trade at Aqaba.

Corporal Driver, having made his point respectfully, returned in half an hour and asked Lawrence to come and have a look at Private Carson. Lawrence, thinking Carson was ill, or had perhaps tried to harm himself in dread of the disgrace to come, hurried to the British camp, where he found the men huddled around a fire, including Carson, who was covered with a blanket, looking “drawn and ghastly.” The corporal pulled off the blanket, and Lawrence saw that Carson’s back was scored with welts. The men had decided that Carson should receive the same punishment as Ali, “even giving him sixty instead of fifty, because he was English!” They had carried out the whipping in front of an Arab witness from Lawrence’s bodyguard, “and hoped I would see they had done their best and call it enough.”

Lawrence’s reaction was odd. “I had not expected anything so drastic, and was taken aback and rather inclined to laugh,” he wrote, and noted that Carson was eventually sent “up-country,” where “he proved to be one of our best men.” Reading between the lines, we can easily guess that a wink passed between Lawrence and Corporal Driver. The Arabs not only were satisfied by Carson’s punishment but apparently assumed that Lawrence had ordered it; and certainly it was well within the old-fashioned traditions of British military discipline to keep an incident like this “within the family,” rather than let it go to a court-martial, which would disgrace the whole unit.

What is harder to understand is why Lawrence included the story in his book at all—it feels out of place, squeezed in between a long description of how he selected his bodyguard and the plans for his campaign against Talifeh. It is preceded by a puzzling disquisition on sex in Arabia, in which Lawrence remarks that “the sacredness of women in nomad Arabia forbade prostitution” (yet there were three prostitutes in Aqaba),and argues that “voluntary and affectionate” sexual relationships among Bedouin were better than “the elaborate vices of Oriental cities” or—in an odd aside—"the bestialities of their peasantry with goats and asses.”

Aside from the fact that stories about peasants having sex with their animals are common to every country and culture, it is hard to see how “the elaborate vices” of Oriental cities would be different from or worse than those practiced in the open air at Aqaba. Granted that frankness about acts and words that were still taboo was one of the things Lawrence sought to bring to literature later on, there is still something disturbing about a man who has recently endured a savage whipping himself feeling “rather inclined to laugh” at the spectacle of two young men just having been whipped. There is also an uneasy feeling of sexual ambivalence—or perhaps simply a lack of sympathy with or understanding of the sexual impulse, which seems to affect Lawrence whenever he writes about what was, for him, an uncongenial subject.

By the second week of January, Lawrence was on the move again. He rode out into the desert with his bodyguard to reconnoiter a ridge overlooking the railway station Jurf el Derawish, thirty miles north of Maan. Deciding that the position was a good one, he brought up Nuri as-Said, with 300 Arab regulars and a mountain gun. Under the cover of darkness, he cut the railway line above and below Jurf, and at dawn opened fire on the station with the mountain gun, silencing the Turkish artillery. Then the Beni Sakhr charged on camels from their position behind the ridge, where they had been hidden. The Turkish garrison, surprised and overwhelmed, surrendered when Nuri captured the Turks’ own gun and turned it on the station at point-blank range. Twenty Turks were wounded or killed, and nearly 200 were taken prisoner—but the discovery of two trains in the station loaded with delicacies for the officers in Medina set the Arabs off on a prolonged burst of looting and gorging, and as a result they missed an opportunity to destroy another train as it approached the station.

During two days of extreme cold, heavy snow, and hail, the tribesaround Shobek, near Petra, stormed and took the town. Hearing the news Nuri rode on to Tafileh through the night, and halting at the edge of the cliff above the town at dawn, he demanded that the town surrender or be shelled, even though his gun and his troops were far behind him. The Turks hesitated—they too had heard the news of the capture of Jurf and Shobek, but they were 150 men, and well armed. Then Auda Abu Tayi cantered out in full sight of them, his heavy cloak flowing behind him, and called out: “Dogs! Do you not know Auda?”

In Liddell Hart’s words, “The defences of Tafila* collapsed before his trumpeting voice as those of Jericho had once collapsed before Joshua.” Holding on to the place was harder, however, since the Arabs immediately began quarreling among themselves, and the majority of the townspeople who were Arab were divided in their loyalty to different clans. Lawrence arrived, and began to spread around gold sovereigns to induce peace, but he had hardly even begun to restore order when news reached him that a sizable Turkish force was marching from Amman to retake Tafileh, consisting of “three … battalions of infantry, a hundred cavalry, two mountain howitzers and twenty-seven machineguns … led by Hamid Fakhri Bey, the commander of the 48th Division.” By late afternoon, the Turks had brushed aside the Arab mounted pickets guarding Wadi Hesa, “a gorge of great width and depth and difficulty” ten miles north of Tafileh, which, like almost every place in Palestine and western Syria, was part of biblical geography, cutting off the land of Moab from that of Edom. Lawrence had been elated by the capture of Jurf, Shobek, and Tafileh, but he was dismayed by the swift response of the Turks; he had assumed they would be too busy defending Amman to worry about retaking Tafileh.

In ordinary circumstances, the right thing for the Arabs to do in the face of a powerful Turkish advance would have been to withdraw, first destroying whatever they could in Tafileh, and carrying away as much booty as they could load on their camels. Instead Lawrence decided to fight a conventional battle, marking a new stage in the development of theArab army. He was moved in part by the plight of the residents of Tafileh, whom the Turks would certainly punish severely for surrendering the town, and in part by a desire to prove to Allenby that the Arabs could fight and win a conventional battle.

Until now, Lawrence had been following his own maxim: “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife,” and his aim was to keep the Turks trying to eat soup with a knife for as long as possible. His model was Marshal de Saxe, who had written, “I am not in favor of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war—I am even convinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so.” Now, Lawrence, a convinced admirer of de Saxe, was following instead the formula of Napoleon: “There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle.” He had not changed his opinion about de Saxe, whose maxims would remain the essential basis for all guerrilla wars on into the present, but he recognized the political reality, which was that the British, and especially the French, were unlikely to take the Arabs’ claims to territory seriously until the Arabs had demonstrated an ability to hold their ground and beat the Turks in a conventional battle of positions. It was not that Lawrence’s philosophy of war had changed; it was that politics, and its by-product, public relations—Lawrence had already learned something from Lowell Thomas—required something more than blowing up bridges and looting trains if the Arabs were to get Damascus. Since Lawrence considered it his job to get them Damascus, he made up his mind to fight the Turks at Tafileh.

In desert skirmishes Lawrence’s command was direct and unchallenged; by contrast, the force at Tafileh had, if anything, too many leaders for its size. The overall commander of the march toward the Dead Sea was Feisal’s younger half brother Zeid, “a cool and gallant fighter,” who did not have much experience directing a battle but who, as a son of the sharif of Mecca (now king of the Hejaz), had the respect of all the tribes, and even of Auda. The uniformed regulars were under the command of Major-General Jaafar Pasha, a former officer in the Turkish army and now Feisal’s chief of staff, a competent professional soldier. Lawrence’sbodyguard was led by Abdulla el Nahabi, a fearless adventurer with a series of murders and assaults on his head, as well as a price. As for the Bedouin, the bulk of them were divided into two mutually hostile factions, since Auda’s tribe and the Motalga were traditional blood enemies. By means of a lavish payment in gold, Auda was sent “back to his desert beyond the railway to contain the garrisons of the Turkish stations,” thus removing one source of friction, but clearly the battle could not be won unless Lawrence took command of it, though he passed his orders through the Arabs’ chief.

It is always difficult to compare battles, but to anybody interested in military history, once allowance is made for the difference in climate and scale, the topography of Tafileh bears a startling resemblance to that of Gettysburg. Lawrence, then, was in the position of Lee, and Hamid Fakhri Bey in the position of Meade, when Longstreet launched his attack against Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—with the crucial difference that Lawrence succeeded.

Tafileh was a small town, hardly more than a large village, in a rugged, forbidding, but beautiful landscape. Prosperous in peacetime, with a population of fewer than 10,000,* it was famous for its green gardens; for its crops of olives, dates, and figs; and for its profusion of wells and hot springs. Set in a deep ravine, it was overlooked by what was almost a terraced cliff to the west, and by a gentler, triangularly rocky plain to the east rising about 3,000 yards from the town to a rock ledge about 2,000 yards in length. At its northern end, this ledge overlooked the road from Kerak, on which the Turks were approaching.

At the first news that the Turks were coming, Jaafar, with the instinctive caution of a trained professional soldier, had moved his men onto the high ground to the west of the town, the textbook solution to the problem. But Lawrence disagreed, both because there was plenty of “dead ground” in front of Jaafar, which would allow the Turks to work their way around his flank instead of attempting a direct frontal attack uphill, andbecause abandoning the town to the Turks was a political and tactical mistake. The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the population of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Armenians who had escaped the massacre, as well as “a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa,” part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local population a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence’s vivid description, “rushed to save their goods and their lives… It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible.” The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were.

Under the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence that the townspeople might be persuaded to fight in their own defense. As dawn broke he gathered up a score or so of the Motalga tribesmen and sent them forward with a few of the local peasantry to engage the Turks, who were deploying on the long ridge at the top of the triangular plain to the east of Tafileh. He then went off to find Zeid and persuade him that Jaafar was positioned on the wrong side of the town, and that the right place to fight a “pitched battle” was in front of the town, on the triangular plain, not on the hills behind. Fortunately, Zeid had already come to the same conclusion. Lawrence, when he wrote about the Battle of Tafileh, would dismiss the action as a military parody—"I would rake up all the old maxims and rules of the orthodox army text-book, and parody them in cold blood today"—but there is no evidence of this in the report he wrote after the battle. On the contrary, no less a judge than Colonel A. P. Wavell, the future field marshal, would describe it as “one of the best descriptions of a battle ever penned.”

BATTLE OF TAFILEH

What strikes one most about Tafileh is that Lawrence could hardlyhave fought with more professional skill and personal daring, whatever he may have thought about it later; this is all the more true since his forces consisted of a wildly ill-assorted collection of Bedouin, armed townsmen, local peasants, and Arab regulars, none of them with much trust in the others, nor, except for the regulars, any experience of discipline. By rights, Fakhri Pasha, with three battalions of infantry, 100 cavalrymen, two mountain howitzers, twenty-seven machine guns, and a unit of armed police, should have been able to retake the town, and no doubt would have done so, had not Lawrence outmaneuvered him.

Lawrence sent Abdulla, a Mesopotamian machine gun officer, and some of his men ahead on mules with two Hotchkiss machine guns to engage the Turks, while the armed townsmen and the Motalga drove the Turkish horseman back across the triangular plain, from the first to the second ridge, where the main body of the Turks was forming up. They were slow to organize, for they had spent a night in the open and were so cold that they were “nearly frozen in their places.” Zeid wanted to wait until Abdulla reported back on the strength of the enemy, but Lawrence elected to follow Napoleon’s advice on how to win a battle: On s’engage, et puis on voit* He plunged into the town; gathered up gorgeously dressed bodyguards, who were busy looting; and told them “to recover their camels” and get to the eastern side of the ravine immediately. As for himself, he went on, barefoot and unarmed, climbing up a steep cliff, then walking across to the first ridge, where he found the remains of some Byzantine stonework, which would serve very well as “a reserve or an ultimate line of defense.” Not many officers in the British army would have cared to walk barefoot over rocks, ice, snow, and the sharp stalks of wormwood plants, but Lawrence consoled himself with the thought that bare feet were surer on icy rocks than boots, and that “the climb would warm me.”

Lawrence stationed Zeid’s personal camel men and some of his own bodyguards on the ridge and told them to stay in full sight, so as to give the impression that the ridge was strongly held—Zeid’s men were not enthusiastic about his order, and he was obliged to harangue them in Arabic and give them his gold signet ring as a symbol of his authority. Then he walked forward alone across the plain toward the second ridge, where it joined the Kerak road where the enemy was forming up. He met Abdulla, coming back to say that he had had five men killed and one gun destroyed. Lawrence sent him back to ask Zeid to move forward with the Arab regulars as soon as possible, then continued walking forward under fire in full view toward the northernmost part of the second ridge, where the Motalga horsemen and the armed townsmen were still fighting fiercely. By now, the Turkish howitzers were firing at them, but their range was too short and the shells were falling instead on the plain all around Lawrence. He stopped and burned his fingers picking up a shell fragment to examine it, deciding it was from a Skoda eleven-pounder. He did not think the townsmen and the Motalga would hold out long under shell fire, and he could see that the Turkish infantry was moving from the road to the second ridge to outflank them. When he reached the townsmen they were out of ammunition, so he sent them back to the second ridge to get more, and told the dismounted Motalga horsemen to cover their retreat, giving them the sound advice “not to quit firing from one position until ready to fire from the next.” The Motalga were amazed to see that Lawrence was unarmed and walking around among them as they tried to shelter behind a small, flinty mound while some twenty Turkish machine guns were firing at them. “The bullets slapped off it deafeningly, and the air above it so hummed and whistled with them and their ricochets and chips, that it felt like sudden death to put one’s head over the top,” Lawrence wrote.

He jokingly reminded the tribesmen of von Clausewitz’s comment that a rear guard effects its purpose more by being than by doing, though this seems unlikely to have cheered them up, even if they had understood it. He then ordered the Motalga to hold out for another ten minutes before retreating, and left them, since he had to walk back across the plain under heavy fire, carefully counting his paces. He wanted to know the exact range to set the sights of his machine guns and his mountain gun, now that it was clear to him that the Turks were going to advance into his trap.

The Motalga held their position for almost ten minutes, as ordered, then mounted and galloped back across the plain. When they reached Lawrence, one of them lent him a stirrup so he could hold on as they raced back to the first ridge. There Lawrence lay down and rested in the sun as the Turks deployed along the ridge at the far end of the plain. Once the enemy were where he wanted them, he sent Rasim, “a Damascene, a sardonic fellow, who rose laughing to every crisis and shrunk around like a sore-headed bear … when things went well,” to lead about eighty horsemen out of sight around the southern edge of the plain to attack the Turks’ left flank. Lawrence reminded himself of the familiar military adage that an attack should be aimed at a point, not a line, and told Rasim to aim for the last man on the Turkish left. He moved men and guns up and down his ridge, clearly visible to the Turks so as to focus their attention on the ridge in front of them, instead of on their flanks. He had more than 100 men from the nearby village of Aima armed and sent them off to attack the Turkish left, then opened fire at the Turkish position on the far ridge with his mountain gun and his machine guns.*

The men from Aima, “who knew every blade of grass on their own village pastures,” crept to within 300 yards of the Turks’ right flank on the exposed ridge before they opened fire with their rifles and Lawrence’s three light machine guns. Rasim had ten of his men dismount and move forward under cover with five automatic weapons, which “crumpled the Turkish left,” then charged with his remaining horsemen. From his position on the ridge nearest Tafileh, Lawrence could see the curved swords of Rasim’s horsemen flashing in the setting sun, at which point he ordered the rest of his men to charge uphill toward the Turks, on horse, on foot,and on camel. These men included the Armenian survivors of the massacre, who drew their knives in anticipation of cutting Turkish throats in revenge. The Turks were driven back into “the broken, precipitous paths, undergrowth, the narrows and defiles,” behind them, where they and their general were massacred. It was, in the words of Liddell Hart, a victory “in the purest classical tradition…. It was Cannae, or still more, Ilipa,* adapted to modern weapons,” a “gem” which placed Lawrence among “the Great Captains.” It also bore out the truth of the duke of Wellington’s remark: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”

“In the end,” Lawrence wrote, “we had taken their two mountain howitzers, very useful to us, their twenty-seven machineguns, two hundred horses and mules, and about two hundred and fifty prisoners. Of the rest above six hundred were killed, and they said only fifty got back, exhausted fugitives, to the railway. All the Arabs on their track rose against them and shot them as they ran. Our men had to give up the pursuit quickly, for they were tired and sore and hungry, and it was pitifully cold. Fighting a battle may be thrilling for the general, but terrible afterwards when the broken flesh that has been his own men is carried past him. It began to snow as we turned back…. The Turkish wounded had to lie out, and were all dead the next day.”

Arab losses were about twenty-five killed and forty wounded. Lawrence reproached himself severely for these. Although he would never wear the ribbon or accept the decoration, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, only one step below the Victoria Cross, for which he had already been recommended.

Wavell’s praise for Lawrence’s account of the Battle of Tafileh was well earned. Better than any novelist, Lawrence succeeded in describing unflinchingly every moment and movement of the battle, and demonstrating that when called on to do so, he could direct his ragtag army in an orthodox way, while coolly exposing himself to danger.

As was so often the case with Lawrence, success was followed by a humiliating failure. One reason is that victory tended to undo the Arabs’ shaky system of alliances, which was always at the mercy of the stronger pull of tribal and clan loyalty. Another was sleet—the foul weather and heavy mud that rendered the camels clumsy and helpless. Lawrence managed to send seventy Bedouin horsemen under Abdulla el Feir to raid the lake port near El Mezraa, at the southernmost end of the Dead Sea, where they overwhelmed a small group of Turkish sailors sleeping on shore, destroyed a motor launch and six lighters, and captured sixty prisoners and ten tons of grain. This interruption of the Turkish grain supply was in some ways more important than the victory at Tafileh, but Lawrence was still anxious to fulfill his promise to Allenby and move the Arab forces north toward Jericho.

He was restless and discontented at Tafileh—forced idleness was never good for Lawrence, and for once even he complained of the vermin. He finally set off for Guweira to meet with Joyce, Feisal, and Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay. Dawnay had been appointed by Allenby to create a “Hejaz Operations Staff” and to establish some kind of military order. Lawrence might have been expected to object to him—Dawnay was tall and thin; was a perfectly uniformed officer of the Coldstream Guards; and was the brother of Brigadier-General Guy Dawnay, who had come up with the plan of feinting at Gaza and putting the weight of the British attack on Beersheba—but something about Alan Dawnay’s cold precision and “brilliant mind” appealed to Lawrence, who called him “Allenby’s greatest gift to us.”

Lawrence rode down to Guweira in foul weather; it was “freezing once again, and the slabby stones of the valley-slopes became sheets of ice.” The camels balked at moving forward, and the men nearly froze to death, and all would have died if Lawrence had not pushed them mercilessly on. Even when they descended into the warmer air of the plain around Guweira, there was no relief. “The pain of the blood fraying its passage once more about our frozen arms and legs and faces was as great and much faster than the slow pain its driving out: and as we warmed we grew sensible that up there in the cold we had torn and bruised ourunfeeling feet nearly to a pulp among the stones. We had not felt them tender while each step was deep in icy mud: but this warm salty mud scoured out the cuts, and in desperation we had to climb up on our sad camels, and beat them woodenly towards Guweira.”

This passage seems to express Lawrence’s state of mind, despite his earlier victory. Ostensibly, he had ridden to Guweira to pick up Ј30,000 in gold sovereigns with which to pay the tribes to the north; but one senses, reading his account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that he was briefly in need of friendly company—Joyce and Dawnay, and Feisal, whom he much preferred to his half brother Zeid—and that he was tired of dealing with Zeid and the recalcitrant tribesmen. He seems not to have been downhearted that Feisal’s attack on the railway watering station at Mudawara had failed. Lawrence understood the lack of cooperation between the Bedouin tribesmen and the Arab regulars.

He spent three days with Joyce, Dawnay, and Feisal, then set off back to Tafileh, with an escort provided by Feisal. Lawrence split the gold coins into thirty canvas bags, each bag containing 1,000 gold sovereigns; two of these bags could be carried by a single camel. Even this was a heavy burden on the poor beasts, with the ice and frozen mud, and his return journey to Tafileh was as cold and difficult as the journey down. Once there, he found waiting for him a young British intelligence officer, Kirkbride, “a taciturn, enduring fellow,” and leaving the gold in Zeid’s care, he rode to Dana with the young man, then rode north on a reconnaissance mission of his own “as far as the edge of the Jordan valley,” from where he could hear Allenby’s guns attacking Jericho. It seemed to Lawrence feasible to bring the Arab army north of the Dead Sea, as he had promised, and he rode back to give Zeid the good news, only to find that Zeid, shamefaced, had been persuaded or browbeaten by the local sheikhs to pay them the gold Lawrence had brought from Guweira. Of the Ј30,000 in gold coins, he had nothing left, so the plan of advancing north was impossible.

Lawrence’s reaction was very like a nervous breakdown. He was “aghast,” and realized at once that this meant “the complete ruin of myplans and hopes.” He decided on the spot to ride directly to see Allenby and offer his resignation. Admittedly, Ј30,000 in gold sovereigns* was a substantial sum, but Lawrence was used to handling thousands of pounds in gold coins at a time, and while he was himself scrupulously honest, he was aware that some of it was wasted, money down the drain. British gold was the lifeblood of the Arab Revolt; it had to be handed out in huge amounts; and Lawrence himself, who at times handed out thousands of pounds a week to the tribes, remarked that it was better (and, in the long run, cheaper) to open a bag and let a man take out as much as he could in a single handful than to dole it out coin by coin. Zeid’s behavior had been weak and foolish, but that was no fault of Lawrence’s. It was an overreaction for him to write that his “will was gone,” and that he dreaded more pain, more suffering, more killing, “the daily posturing in alien dress,” in short, the whole role that had been thrust upon him, and that he had reached out for so eagerly when it was presented to him at Rabegh a year and a half ago. Now he blamed himself bitterly for “that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race.” He was clearly suffering from what was then called shell shock, and is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. He believed that he had lost his nerve, that he had “made a mess of things,” and was determined to throw himself on Allenby’s mercy.

He rode directly west, making a journey of more than eighty miles in twenty hours over terrible terrain in a countryside at war, where a party of five men on camels might easily be attacked by anyone, or shot by the British. At last he dismounted at Beersheba, thinking he had made his final camel ride, to learn that Allenby had just taken Jericho. By car and train he traveled north through the night to Bir Salem, where, to his surprise, Hogarth was waiting on the platform to greet him. Much as Lawrence may have been astonished by Hogarth’s presence, Hogarth was not Merlin, and one may therefore suppose that somebody at Aqaba or at Beersheba passed on the message that Lawrence was on his way to Allenby in a desperate state of mind. Hogarth, and the Arab Bureau,would have been at pains to make sure that this meeting did not take place until Lawrence was put in a calmer state of mind, and nobody was better suited to this task than Hogarth. To be blunt, no one had more at stake either, for Lawrence was the most visible asset of the Arab Bureau, the brightness of his fame casting the rest of the bureau into shadow, where, as an intelligence agency shaping British policy in the Middle East, it was anxious to remain.

In any case, Lawrence, barefoot in his robe, cloak, and headdress, unburdened himself then and there on the station platform to Hogarth, equally disguised in the uniform of a naval officer. Hogarth listened patiently, as he always did. Lawrence complained that he was “a very sick man, almost at breaking point,” that he was “sick of responsibility,” that he had been given “a free hand,” rather than an order, that “Cairo had put on him the moral responsibility for buoying up the Arabs with promises that might never be fulfilled,” and that he had lost faith in the Arabs’ ability to handle their own affairs even if those promises were fulfilled. His experience with the British troops manning the armored cars had reawakened his appreciation for his own countrymen, and taught him that vehicles might be as useful as camels for warfare in the desert. He wanted to be in “a subordinate position,” handling machines, not people, “a cog himself in the military machine.” In the words of Liddell Hart—and he was quoting from his conversations with Lawrence—"The harness of obedience was better than the self-applied spur of command.” When Lawrence told Liddell Hart this, of course, it was years later and he was already serving in the ranks, so he may have been retroactively applying this thought to the events of February 1918, but perhaps the decision to serve “solitary in the ranks” had already formed itself in his mind. These moments of complete despair had occurred before in Lawrence’s life—he had suffered one on his ride into Syria before Aqaba—and would recur frequently in years to come. Hogarth may also have realized, better than Lawrence himself, the cost of constantly playing the hero among people who were critical judges of heroism.

In any case, it was clear to Hogarth that his protйgй was in bad straits,and very wisely he did not try to argue with Lawrence, but instead took him off to have breakfast with Brigadier-General Clayton, another of those strong, silent Englishmen who had won Lawrence’s trust. An odd little group they must have made in the officers’ mess over the toast and marmalade: the small barefoot major in his Arab costume, the neatly bearded Oxford don in his naval uniform, and the tall professional soldier. It would be interesting to know what the other officers in the mess thought of this unlikely trio, but by the time Lawrence had reached the breakfast table he had calmed down considerably. Hogarth may have advised him to forget about the Ј30,000 worth of gold coins; it was water under the bridge (and “a drop in the barrel as well,” considering what the Arab Revolt was costing Britain every month), but in any case the subject did not come up again. Like the skilled producer he was, Hogarth had soothed his troubled star, and Clayton, playing his role, firmly pointed out that Lawrence was indispensable, that Allenby had great things in store for him—the kind of praise that Lawrence, for all his apparent lack of vanity and ambition, could never resist. Clayton added that General Jan Smuts of South Africa, even then the supreme fixer and stage manager of imperial Britain, had paid a visit to General Allenby on behalf of the prime minister to emphasize the crucial importance of victory over the Turks, and to promise reinforcements in men and weapons. These promises, like so many of Lloyd George’s, were not to be fulfilled, since the Germans would launch their great spring offensive in a few weeks’ time; but Allenby’s mood was optimistic, and neither Clayton nor Hogarth wanted Lawrence to bring his personal loss of self-confidence to the attention of the commander in chief.

In the end Clayton bluntly told Lawrence that there was no question of “letting [him] off,” and took him straight from the breakfast table to Allenby, who had for several days been sending airplanes out to find Tafileh and drop messages to Lawrence, ordering him to report in immediately. He was in no mood to listen patiently to Lawrence’s problems, even had Lawrence cared to recite them. Smuts’s visit had conveyed Lloyd George’s burning desire to shift focus from the western front to theMiddle East and “to knock Turkey out of the war” as the first step toward victory, although the war cabinet and the CIGS were somewhat taken aback when Allenby replied that he would need an additional sixteen divisions to do it. In the end all he would get was one British division and one Indian infantry division from Mesopotamia, and one Indian cavalry division from France.

If Allenby was going to push his advance north against the Turks, he needed the Arabs to become, in effect, his right wing, taking on the Turkish Fourth Army to the east of the Jordan River. The Arabs would have to concentrate against one objective at a time, quite a different procedure from the irregular warfare they had waged so far. To accomplish that, Allenby needed Lawrence, who seemed to be the only person who could get the Arabs to fight in an organized way. Ironically, Lawrence’s success at Tafileh had had the effect of making everybody at headquarters in Jerusalem overestimate the Arab army’s ability to fight a conventional battle.

Allenby’s overbearing optimism simply rode roughshod over Lawrence’s self-doubts, and, with whatever reservations, Lawrence agreed “to take up again my mantle of fraud.” No doubt he knew better than to show a glum face. Allenby thus persuaded Lawrence to accept a significant change in tactics. For Lawrence, the Arabs’ great advantage over the Turks was space, the immense and empty desert. The Arabs could appear anywhere on its periphery in small numbers, attack the Turks, and then retire back into the desert, where the Turks could not follow them.

Now, Allenby wanted the Arabs to concentrate on the town of Maan and take it, cutting the railway south to Medina once and for all. Lawrence thought it could be done—or at least said it could be done—and even proposed a refinement of the plan. He suggested cutting the railway some miles north of Maan, so that in order to fight the Turkish garrison would have to come out into the desert, “where the Arabs would easily defeat [them].” This sounds like overconfidence on Lawrence’s part, but given his admiration for Allenby, or perhaps out of relief that the subject of the missing Ј30,000 worth of gold hadn’t come up, he may have laid it on a little thicker than he meant to.

In return, Lawrence had demands of his own. He would need at least 700 camels, to bring troops and supplies north from Aqaba—already, his purchases of camels in Arabia had driven up the price and reduced the supply—an immense increase in weapons, and, as usual, a lot more gold. More important, he wanted some assurance that the Turks would be prevented from bringing reinforcements down from Amman, with the obvious risk that the Arabs might be caught “between pincers,” from Medina in the south and Amman in the north. Allenby agreed, and explained that he intended to take Salt, and could then destroy as much of the railway as necessary, south of Amman. Lawrence was doubtful about the wisdom of Allenby’s plan—he knew the Arabs well enough to suspect that they would lose heart the moment the British fell back from Amman—but he seems to have kept this doubt to himself, though he hinted at his reservations to Allenby’s chief of staff. Perhaps this was because Allenby was one of the very few people Lawrence found it impossible to resist.

The next day, February 28, Lawrence was invited to a corps conference, at which the plans were dealt with in more detail, and during which Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, who commanded the XX Corps and would “direct the advance,” asked Lawrence “how his men were to distinguish friendly from hostile Arabs, since their tendency was to be prejudiced against all wearing skirts.” This was an odd—though sensible—question, to which Lawrence, who was of course in his white robe, replied, not very helpfully, “that skirt-wearers disliked men in uniform.” This caused some laughter, but did not, of course, answer Chet-wode’s question. In fact, during the relatively brief time when the British and the Arab army came into contact, there were many unfortunate incidents in which British and Australian troops took Lawrence’s Bedouin for hostiles, particularly because they tended to assume that all “natives” were thieves or cutthroats. Distrust of “wogs” was fairly widespread in the British army, but Lawrence’s victory at Tafileh had made the Arab army briefly more popular, and had given it a certain credibility among the British that it lacked when it was chiefly engaged in looting trains, however important such looting was to the cause.

Confidence in the Arab army was high enough that Lawrence asked for, and got, permission to use the Imperial Camel Brigade, a handpicked unit composed of British yeomanry and Australians mounted on Sudanese camels. The yeomanry were British volunteer cavalry units, usually formed in rural areas, with the local farmers, or their sons or tenants, serving as troopers, and the local gentry, or their sons, as officers. Lawrence complained that both the camels and the men were too heavy to cover long distances in the desert, and insisted that the men and their beasts be slimmed down, and trained to subsist on the bare minimum of water. With them as “shock troops,” he hoped to be able to threaten Deraa, when the time came, and fight the Turks as they attempted to retreat.

It was an ambitious plan, but despite the efforts of Lawrence, Alan Dawnay, and Joyce to supply such a widespread advance involving so many different elements, it failed to come off as planned. In the event, these plans were overshadowed by the German spring offensive on the western front in France, which breached the British line and sent the British army “reeling backwards on Amiens.” This was Germany’s last card, intended to drive the British back to the Channel ports; it used fifty additional divisions, which the Germans could withdraw from the eastern front now that the Bolshevik government had signed a peace. The Germans’ hope was to win a victory, or at least a negotiated peace, before American divisions arrived in quantity in France. Even so convinced an “easterner” as Lloyd George was startled by the size and ferocity of the German attack—it began with the biggest artillery barrage of the war, 1.1 million shells fired in five hours—and by the horrifying prospect that after four years of trench warfare and millions of casualties the Germans might still manage to drive a wedge between the French and British armies, take Paris, and push the BEF to the sea.* In the circumstances, Allenby’s plan to cross the Jordan River no longer seemed crucial, andvery shortly he would be stripped of two complete British divisions (as well as numerous artillery, cavalry, and machine gun units), and with them his superiority in manpower and firepower over the Turks.

It is hard to guess Lawrence’s state of mind in March 1918, while he was busy preparing for an advance which would not come off, and about which he was by no means confident. He spent some time in Cairo, where the Arab army now had its own little headquarters in the Savoy Hotel, and then returned to Aqaba, where he had to deal with a newcomer: Captain Hubert Young of the Indian army. Young, a fluent Arabic-speaker, had been designated as Lawrence’s “understudy” now that Lawrence’s indispensability had been recognized by almost everyone in Egypt. Lawrence went out of his way to be polite about Young, but the two men were a bad match, although they had gotten along well enough at Carchemish before the war. Young had deeply resented Lawrence’s presence in Mesopotamia in 1916, and he was not very much more tolerant of Lawrence now, though in the interest of civility he did his best to hide his feelings. A look at Young’s portrait in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is enough to tell the story: the touchy superiority, the suspicion in his eyes, the unmistakable look of a man who is standing on his dignity and fears he is about to be made fun of at any moment. It is by far the least appealing portrait in the book. Young at first remarked with some satisfaction that “Lawrence was only one of the many British officers who were helping the Arabs,” but then came to what was, for him, the dispiriting conclusion that although Joyce was in theory the senior British officer and Lawrence’s commanding officer, and Dawnay was officially the chief staff officer, “Lawrence really counted more than either of them with Allenby and Feisal, and used to flit backwards and forwards between G. H. Q. and Feisal’s headquarters as the spirit moved him.” The use of the word “flit” expresses perfectly Young’s disapproval of Lawrence and his flowing white robes.

No sooner had Young arrived at Aqaba than he was to receive a further shock—instead of a neat chain of command in which Major Lawrence reported to Lieutenant-Colonel Dawnay and through Dawnay to theircommanding officer, Colonel Joyce, it was announced that Lawrence himself had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel, and been awarded the DSO for Tafileh (“For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”), so that he was now equal in rank to Alan Dawnay, and Young was put even more deeply in the shade. Lawrence later dismissed Young’s role, relegating him to taking over “the transport, and general quartermaster work,” but that is not how Young saw his job, then or later.

March or April 1918 (the exact date is uncertain) provided another irritation for Young in the form of the unexpected arrival of Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase. Young jumped to the conclusion that Lawrence had invited the two Americans to Aqaba in pursuit of publicity, whereas in fact they had been allowed to go there by Allenby. Indeed Allenby himself made the suggestion to Thomas at a luncheon in Jerusalem for HRH the duke of Connaught (the seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria), who had come to confer on Allenby “the Grand Cross of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem.” The duke had hoped to decorate Lawrence too, but Lawrence took good care to be absent. It is a comment on Lowell Thomas’s Yankee persistence, affability, and effectiveness that he had managed to get himself invited to the luncheon, where he was encouraged to go to Aqaba. Thomas’s journey there would prove unexpectedly long and difficult—he and Chase “[sailed] fifteen hundred miles up the Nile into the heart of Africa to Khartum, and then across the Nubian Desert for five hundred miles to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where we hoped to get accommodation on a tramp vessel of some sort.” Although Allenby had given his blessing to the expedition, he did not apparently feel obliged to provide transportation, since Thomas and Chase could have taken a train from Cairo to Port Suez, and then been accommodated comfortably on a supply ship or a naval vessel from Port Suez directly to Aqaba, a journey of only a few days. The benefit of the roundabout route was that it allowed the pair to record on film Luxor and Thebes, a sandstorm in Khartoum, a visit to “Shereef Yusef el Hindi … the holiest man in the Sudan” (whose desert library, Thomas assured his American readers, apparently with a straight face, contained a volume of speeches by Woodrow Wilson), and a trip across the Red Sea on a steamer loaded with horses, mules, donkeys, and sheep, and a crew consisting of “Hindus, Somalis, Berberines, and fuzzy-wuzzies.” At Aqaba, Thomas and Chase were sent ashore on a barge loaded with mules and donkeys, and when one of the donkeys “was kicked overboard by a nervous mule,” it was immediately torn apart and devoured by two gigantic sharks. Lowell Thomas was not the inventor of “the travelogue” for nothing—all these incidents would play a role in the lecture and film show that would make “Lawrence of Arabia” world famous, so it is perhaps just as well that Thomas and Chase were obliged to take the long way around. Only a few hours after the donkey had been eaten by the sharks, “Lawrence himselfcame down the Wadi Itm, returning from one of his mysterious expeditions into the blue.”

Young.

“To accompany Lawrence and his body-guard on an expedition was a fantastic experience,” Lowell Thomas would write in his best-selling book With Lawrence in Arabia, though he never actually did go on such an expedition. “First rode the young shereef, incongruously picturesque with his Anglo-Saxon face, gorgeous head-dress and beautiful robes. Likely enough, if the party were moving at a walking pace, he would be reading or smiling to himself over the brilliant satire of Aristophanes in the original. Then in a long, irregular column his Bedouin ‘sons’ followed in their rainbow-colored garments, swaying to the rhythm of the camel gait…. At either end of the cavalcade was a warrior poet. One of them would begin to chant a verse, and each man, all along the column, would take his turn to cap the poet’s words with lines of the same meter.”

This vision of the young “prince of Mecca,” engrossed in a volume of the Greek classics (in “the original” Greek, of course) as he and his colorful bodyguard ride across the desert on “one of his mysterious expeditions into the blue,” was one that Lowell Thomas would fix firmly in the popular mind—so firmly that even forty-four years later, when David Lean’s award-winning film Lawrence of Arabia was released to international acclaim, the Lawrence it portrayed still owed much to the colorful reporting of Thomas and the inspired photography of Chase. There is a considerable difference between Lawrence’s estimate of how much time Thomas spent with them and Thomas’s own account. Jeremy Wilson, in his authorized biography of T. E. Lawrence, writes that Thomas “spent less than a fortnight with Feisal’s army and saw Lawrence for only a few days.” This is surely correct, but it leaves out the intensity of the time Thomas and Chase did spend with Lawrence, and their determination to get as many photographs, reels of film, and interviews as they could, as well as Lawrence’s willingness to cooperate. Judging from the number of photographs Chase took (many of them artfully staged), and from Thomas’s voluminous notes, Lawrence was not only cooperative but enthusiastic; and in one of the photographs showing Lawrence and Lowell Thomastogether, Lawrence looks unusually relaxed and good-humored, not at all like a man being inconvenienced by two importunate Yankee journalists. Nor can Lawrence have been under any illusion that Lowell Thomas was going to write a series of thoughtful, fact-filled dispatches about the Arab army and the war in the Hejaz. Thomas was a showman, an inspired huckster in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, a lecturer who would prove every bit as successful as Mark Twain; and anybody meeting him, let alone someone as intelligent as Lawrence, would have known all that about him in five minutes or less. As for Chase, he was a Hollywood cameraman, not a documentary filmmaker—his job was to put glamour on film. Lawrence himself may have enjoyed pulling the leg of the gullible American, but if so, the American had the last laugh. Thomas may or may not have believed everything he was told, but in either case he managed to sell it, burnished with his own additions, exaggerations, romantic touches, and flamboyant prose, to an audience of millions.

With Lawrence in Arabia is artfully written; it suggests that Thomas was an eyewitness to Lawrence’s desert operations, without actually saying so, a familiar journalistic trick. Lawrence himself wrote Thomas out of Seven Pillars of Wisdom altogether, and later made it clear that Thomas “was never in the Arab firing line, nor did he ever see an operation or ride with me.” There is no question, however, that Lawrence posed for innumerable staged photographs then and later on, including one in which he is claimed to be lying in the sand beside his kneeling camel’s neck, holding his Lee-Enfield rifle at the ready, a bandolier of.303 cartridges around his neck, as if there were Turks on the horizon. In another he (or somebody else) appears disguised, his face covered with an embroidered flowered veil, as “a Gypsy woman of Syria,” in which costume he planned to go behind the enemy lines to spy out information—something Lawrence actually did later on. Oddly enough, Thomas went to some trouble to deny that Lawrence cooperated with Chase in these carefully staged pictures. “My cameraman, Mr. Chase,” Thomas wrote, “uses a high-speed camera. We saw considerable of Colonel Lawrence in Arabia, and although he arranged for us to get both ‘still’ and motion pictures of Emir Feisal,

Auda Abu Tayi, and the other Arab leaders, he would turn away when he saw the lens pointing in his direction…. Frequently Chase snapped pictures of the colonel without his knowledge, or just at the instant that he turned and found himself facing the lens and discovered our perfidy.”

Nobody looking at Chase’s photographs of Lawrence could possibly believe this story. They are not casual “snaps"; they are quite clearly well-thought-out formal portraits or carefully faked “action” scenes, for which the subject’s willing cooperation would have been essential; and in fact Lawrence would pose for more of them later on, in London, where studio lighting and a backdrop were required. It suited both Thomas and Lawrence to pretend that Lawrence was the unwitting victim of the photographer—from Thomas’s point of view, it made the whole story more of a scoop; and from Lawrence’s, it freed him from the accusation of seeking publicity—but it cannot be true.

Feisal, whose understanding of the value of American publicity was a good deal sharper than Lawrence’s, played the good host, taking Thomas and Chase on a long trip out into the desert—providing more good footage for Chase of camels, Bedouin, and tents—and sent them on an excursion to Petra, “the rose-red city, half as old as Time,” where Thomas wondered whether “we had not been transported to a fairy-land on a magically-colored Persian carpet.” Chase’s pictures would later appear in Lowell Thomas’s show about Lawrence, as well as in future travelogues.

Everybody seems to have been aware of just how important it was to present a positive picture of the Arab Revolt to America. Thomas got Clayton and Hogarth to talk to him about Lawrence, despite the fact that as senior intelligence officers they might have kept their mouths shut. Thomas also interviewed people at Aqaba, where everybody may have embellished stories about Lawrence for Thomas’s benefit. Bedouin tribesmen, many of whom believed that the Koran forbade photography, since it involved making a human image, nevertheless meekly allowed Chase to take their pictures, and Feisal provided masses of horsemen and camel riders, banners flowing and swords drawn, for action crowd scenes. Whether Lawrence was conscious of it or not, the few days hespent with Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase in Aqaba would eventually be instrumental in creating the legend of “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Lawrence may not have realized that he had launched himself on a collision course with a new and potent combination of tabloid newspapers, press photography, and the cinema, but what he did in those few days at Aqaba would change his life far more than the mere acceptance of a few decorations and medals could have done. He had the good fortune—or perhaps the bad luck—to put himself in the hands of one of the most gifted and silver-tongued promoters of the twentieth century, a man who would be a star in media not even invented yet, and who would live on to 1981: a long life devoted to making himself and Lawrence household names.

It was at about this time, after Lawrence had left Thomas and Chase to continue their interviews and filming without him, that he rode north to Shobek, about twenty miles from Petra, and learned there of the death of Daud, the friend of Farraj, one of his two high-spirited servant boys. Farraj himself came to Lawrence with the news that Daud had frozen to death at Azrak.* In Lawrence’s account of this, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, there is a clear change of mood, as if some of the exuberance and joy he had felt in his relationships with the Arabs was being squeezed out by the war. Fearless as he may have been for himself, Lawrence was not indifferent to the death of others, particularly those whom he loved, or for whom he felt responsible. He wrote of Farraj and Daud that they “had been friends from childhood, going about hand in hand, for the happiness of feeling one another, and diverting our march by their eternal gaiety.” He reflected on the “openness and honesty in their love, which proved its innocence; for with other couples we had seen how, when passion had thrust in, it had not been friendship any more, but a half-marriage, a shamefaced union of the flesh.” The relationship between Daud and Farraj leads Lawrence on to another of those curious speculations about sexuality, which occasionally puzzle the reader of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and make it clear that Lawrence’s ideas about heterosexuality were a strange mixture of innocence, idealism, his mother’s disapproving eye for the slightest sign of sexual arousal, and the awful example (from Lawrence’s point of view) of Thomas Lawrence’s having given up his fortune and place in society out of lust for his daughters’ governess. “European women,” Lawrence wrote, “were either volunteers or conscientious objectors in this war to govern men’s bodies,” whereas, “in the Mediterranean, women’s influence and supposed purpose were circumscribed and the posture of men before her sexual.”

It is hard to unravel exactly what this means, but it clearly ties in with Lawrence’s assumption that women endured sex unwillingly in the European world, where as in the East “all the things men valued—love, companionship, friendliness—became impossible heterosexually, for where there was no equality there could be no mutual affection.” Of course Lawrence judged eastern domestic life as an outsider, whose relationship with the Arabs was either at work in Carchemish, or at war, when they were far from home. Much as he liked to think he had become part of their lives, he was still excluded from what went on between husband and wife (or wives) and from gauging the degree to which Arabs were invisibly influenced by women or by the demands of domestic life. All that, in the Arab world, took place behind a curtain, but the intrigues of the wives and concubines of the Turkish sultan, and the degree to which a woman of the harem might conspire to put her own son on the throne in place of another, should have cured Lawrence of the notion that women in the East were necessarily without ambition, interest, or influence in public or business affairs, or always submissive to their husband. King Hussein may have been an imposing, if infuriating, figure, but who knows what his four wives had to say to him about the relative positions of their sons when he stepped behind the closed door of his private apartments? The voices of women went largely unheard in the Middle East until very recently in its history, but this does not mean that they did not have ways to make themselves heard in private, or that men did not seek theiradvice, approval, or judgment, as they do elsewhere—or did not have to endure the relentless questioning of a strong-willed mother, as Lawrence himself did. The notion that male Arab society provided a “spiritual union,” which complemented “carnal marriage,” and that “these bonds between man and man [were] at once so intense, so obvious, and so simple,” is a nice tribute to Daud and Farraj, but a very doubtful generalization about marriage in the East, which, while it is certainly different in many ways from marriage in the modern, industrialized West, is perhaps not as different as outsiders may suppose.

Lawrence’s plan for the spring campaign was at once ambitious and simple. He would support Allenby’s raid on Amman with three separate operations: in the center, Jaafar’s regulars, whose numbers were increasing, would seize the railway north of Maan; in the south, Joyce would attack Mudawara with the armored cars, and cut the railway line to Medina once and for all; in the north, Lawrence would join Allenby at Salt, raising the tribes all along the way. Although Lawrence himself still had doubts about whether Jaafar’s men could really take Maan, he finally deferred to the optimism of Feisal and Jaafar, and temporarily returned to his position as “an advisor,” though he “privately … implored Jaafar not to risk too great a disaster.”

Conveying more optimism than he felt, Lawrence rode north with his bodyguard and “an immense caravan of … camels, carrying five thousand rifles, great quantities of ammunition, and food, for the adherents in the north,” only a week after a furious blizzard had covered the ground with snowdrifts. In the last light of day, Lawrence rode alone close to the railway line and surprised a solitary Turkish soldier, who had left his rifle a few yards away while he took a nap. Lawrence had the soldier, “a young man stout, but sulky looking,” covered with his pistol, but after a moment, he merely said, “God is merciful,” and rode off, faintly interested to see whether the Turk would grab the rifle and shoot him. This is Lawrence at his best—not just the moment of mercy toward an enemy, but the moral courage (and perverted curiosity) to test whether the “Turk was1 What the czar actually said, during a conversation reported by the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg in 1853-in the course of which the czar raised the possibility that Russia and Great Britain might split up the Ottoman Empire between them-was: “We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill; it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made. man enough not to shoot me in the back.” Note too Lawrence’s careful distinction—the rightthing for the Turkish soldier to do would of course have been to shoot Lawrence, but the manlything for him to do was to spare Lawrence, as he himself had been spared. How many British officers would have felt that way? How many would have put their lives at risk to see what the outcome would be? It is one of the most interesting and consistent parts of Lawrence’s character that he continually set himself these moral tests, in which he risked everything to see whether he could live up to his own ideals.

On the fourth day Lawrence arrived in the Atara region, just south of Amman, where the various clans of the Beni Sakhr were gathering, to take advantage of the “flood-ponds” of water and of the “succulent greenstuff” of the spring. Lawrence’s opinion of those on whom he was relying tells its own story: “Mitfleh with honeyed words came out to welcome us, his face eaten up by greed and his voice wheezy with it.” The plan was to cross the railway line and meet the rest of the Beni Sakhr at Themed. Turki, one of the tribal leaders, had agreed to serve Feisal while his brother continued to serve the Turks, to keep them from suspecting what was about to happen. Turki would take the four nearest railway stations south of Amman—Lawrence did not think this would be difficult—and bring their garrisons in as prisoners, giving them a safe-conduct to reach British prisoner-of-war camps; then the whole force would move toward Salt to make contact with the British. Salt would then become the center of operations for both the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and the Arab army, which could be supplied by means of a new road from Jericho, and both armies would take advantage of the chaos spread along the Turkish lines of communication south of Amman to advance toward the north and threaten Damascus.

The British often complained that the Arabs did not live up to what they had promised to do, but in this case it was the British who let the Arabs down badly. The weakening of Allenby’s forces was fatal, and in addition, the Germans had sent out as many units and specialists as possible to stiffen Turkish resistance. Lawrence seems to have relaxed and enjoyed himself “with every hollow a standing pool and the valley-beds tall with grass and painted with flowers,” while waiting for news. Both he and the Arab chieftains were worried about Allenby’s intention to fall back on Salt after taking Amman, and they were right. A report that Allenby had taken Amman was followed almost instantly by the news that it was untrue, and more alarming yet, that he had lost Salt, was in full retreat, and might actually have to give up Jerusalem. The Beni Sakhr would be exposed to the Turks’ revenge. The Turks were already using improvised gallows to hang those who had greeted the arrival of the British with too much enthusiasm. The Beni Sakhr prudently returned their 1,200 Turkish prisoners to the four railway stations from which they had been captured, after giving them back all their personal possessions and arms.

Lawrence decided to ride south to see Feisal, but not before examining for himself what had happened in Amman, and how strong its defenses were. He and Farraj eventually made their way into the town with three Gypsy women Lawrence had hired, dressed like them in long robes with flowered veils. Even so, they attracted the attention of the Turkish soldiers, who chased after them, imagining them to be prostitutes. They fled, though not before Lawrence reached the depressing conclusion that the British had not done enough to damage the railway seriously, and that Amman was too heavily defended to be taken easily. Dangerous as all this was, it was also a kind of high-spirited prank, one that Lawrence could play only with someone like Farraj as his companion.

The next day, on the way south, following the railway line, Lawrence’s small group of Arabs saw a patrol of Turkish soldiers, perhaps eight in all. Lawrence saw no reason to bother with them—he could easily continue his march out of their sight or range—but his Arabs, including Farraj, wanted to attack and he let them do so. In the brief fight that followed, Farraj was shot, and fell from his camel. Lawrence found the boy “sunken in that loneliness which came to hurt men who believed death near.” The Turkish bullet had passed through his spine, and he could not move. Then one of the Arabs shouted an alarm—fifty more Turkish soldiers were coming toward them, and a motor trolley could be heard on the line. The tribesmen tried to pick Farraj up, but he screamed in pain so terribly that they had to give up the attempt.

One senses Lawrence’s sadness in this passage—perhaps the saddest and most moving in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.He could not leave Farraj there alive for the Turks to find. They treated European prisoners of war with cruel neglect, but they tortured Arabs unmercifully, sometimes mutilating them or burning them alive. “For this reason,” Lawrence wrote, “we were all agreed before action to finish off one another, if too badly hurt to be moved away, but I had never realized that it might fall upon me to kill Farraj.”

“I knelt down beside him, holding my pistol near the ground by his head, so that he should not see my purpose, but he must have guessed it, and clutched at me with his harsh, scaly hand…. I waited a moment, and he said, ‘Daud will be angry with you,’ the old smile coming back strangely to his grey face. I replied, ‘Salute him from me,’ and he gave the formal answer, ‘God give you peace,’ and shut his eyes to make my work easier.”

The number of people with whom Lawrence had a lighthearted and intimate relationship is very small, and there were very few among the Arabs in the two years that he fought with them. However close he may have felt to Feisal, Feisal was a prince and a major political figure with ambitions to win his own crown. Even Auda, with whom Lawrence got along well, was an older man, shamelessly avaricious and ambitious. None of these were people with whom Lawrence could indulge in his own undergraduate high jinks, or who would have responded well to playfulness. Only with his two servants, Daud and Farraj, could he let that side of him appear, and now they were both dead, one by his own hand, the other because he had been left in Azrak to freeze to death. Of Dahoum, the only other young man with whom Lawrence felt totally at ease, little is known. All evidence suggests that Dahoum died of typhus in 1916, along with much of the workforce remaining at Carchemish, though some have speculated that he worked as a spy for Lawrence behind the enemy lines in Syria. Indeed, one of Lawrence’s British machine gunners, Thomas Beaumont, claimed to have met Dahoum, and alleged that his real name now that he was “a grown man and past the nickname stage” was Salim Ahmed, but since Beaumont frequently made up stories about Lawrence to sell to the press later on, this is doubtful. In any case, Dahoum was unreachable to Lawrence. Daud and Farraj had played something of the same role as Dahoum for him, though on Lawrence’s part there was never the same intensity of feeling that he had for Dahoum, who was almost certainly the only person that Lawrence loved in every possible way except sexually. Now he was alone.

When Lawrence arrived “in sight of Maan,” on April 13, he found that Jaafar’s Arab regulars had indeed captured a nearby railway station in the hope of tempting the Turkish garrison out into the desert to fight; but, carried away by their success, they had decided to make a full-scale assault on the town, despite the fact that they had neither the forces nor the artillery shells to carry it off. It was another military failure. The plan was too complicated, involving three columns: the center one composed of Arab regulars and Auda’s horsemen; the northern one, of more Arab regulars under Jaafar himself; and the southern one, of armored cars and Egyptian camelry, under Dawnay, since Joyce had been evacuated to Egypt with pneumonia at the last minute. When the British had failed to take Amman and had retired beyond Salt, the attack on Maan should in any case have been canceled, but it went forward anyway and miscarried badly, in the absence of a single commander who could pull the disparate forces together. Feisal himself was present, but did not attempt to fill a role as a battlefield commander. Lawrence went forward to watch the battle from a Ford car, instead of riding his usual camel, and was disappointed to see that even his old warhorse Auda Abu Tayi had done little to help the Arab regulars—Lawrence soon realized that it was a mistake to mix regulars and Bedouin forces, though he did not forgive Auda. The next day, when Auda entered Feisal’s tent, and said, “Greetings, Lurens,” Lawrence merely replied coldly, “Greetings for yesterday evening, Auda.”

Lawrence went south to join Dawnay in yet another attack on the railway station at Mudawara, which this time was captured by a joint Arab-Egyptian force, aided by British armored cars. The victory sparked an epic splurge of looting (in which Lawrence managed to walk off with the station bell), and prolonged fighting between the Arabs and the Egyptians over the spoils. Lawrence quelled the disorder without raising his voice, “like the hypnotic influence of a lion-tamer,” according to one witness. As usual the Arab force disintegrated as the men made for home with their loot, but Dawnay took his armored cars and the Egyptians south and destroyed nearly eighty miles of railway track, as well as seven stations and numerous causeways and bridges, severing the link to Medina. The town was now isolated; the Turks were left there until they chose to surrender.

Lawrence proposed to move north and destroy another eighty miles of railway line north of Maan, thereby isolating it like Medina; but first he and Dawnay sailed to Egypt, to meet with Allenby, only to learn to their dismay that, on the vague promise that “twenty thousand tribesmen” would come to their support, the British were proposing to advance on Salt again. Lawrence was infuriated that Allenby’s staff was dealing with the Arabs directly, instead of going through him, and he was right. The promised tribesmen did not appear, having been bought off by a higher bid from the Turks. The subsequent British attack against the well-prepared Turkish defense failed, and the British were obliged to retreat back to the Jordan valley.

Lawrence was neither surprised nor completely displeased. He felt this experience would teach Allenby’s staff a lesson—that communications with the Arab tribesmen were best left in his hands—and would reinforce the importance of Feisal as the one Arab leader the staff could trust. As for Allenby, he decided to make a virtue of necessity, and made plans to attack the Turks up the coast, while keeping their attention fixed on Salt and Amman.

While he was in Egypt Lawrence took advantage of the moment by persuading Allenby to give him 2,000 riding camels, which were made available by the imminent disbanding of the Imperial Camel Brigade and which would hugely improve the mobility of Feisal’s army. Lawrence also received a commitment to make more aircraft available to bomb Turkish strongholds and destroy their communications. By May 1918 Lawrence was already a master of “combined operations,” as they would become known in the next world war, involving irregular camel-mounted tribesmen and horsemen, armored cars operating far out in the desert, regular infantry, artillery, and “ground attack” aircraft. He was, in fact, one of the first to use aircraft to support ground attacks directly, with the enthusiastic help of Brigadier-General Geoffrey Salmond, commander of the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East.

From May through July the war in what is now Jordan went on in a steady succession of raids, train and bridge demolitions, and hit-and-run attacks against the Turks. While Allenby prepared for his big offensive—for he, like Lawrence, was determined to take Damascus in 1918—Lawrence continued to put his life at risk to keep the Turks on the defensive to the east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Much of this action was small-scale but desperate fighting. He wrote about one example with unusual frankness in Seven Pillars of Wisdom:“When combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand, I used to turn myself in. The disgust of being touched revolted me more than the thought of death and defeat…. Anyway I had not the instinct to sell my life dearly, and to avoid the indignity of trying not to be killed and failing, rode straight for the enemy to end the business, in all the exhilaration of that last and terrific and most glad pain of death.” In this case, it turned out that the “enemy” were friendly tribesmen: they had donned the clothes of Turks whose post they had rushed, and at the last minute they recognized “Lurens.” It is interesting that Lawrence was able to write so clinically about his revulsion at being touched, as well as the fact that he “felt fear, disgust, boredom, but anger very seldom,” or that “Only once or twice, when I was alone and lost heart in the desert, and had no audience, did I break down.” Lawrence apparently felt no revulsion at killing, except when he had to execute a friend. Long ago, he had set out to cut a notch in the stock of hisrifle for every Turk he shot, but he gave up after the fourth, either because he thought the notches boastful, or because this count no longer mattered to him—after all, he killed far more Turks with dynamite.

It is also interesting to note his awareness of the extent to which his courage required an “audience,” which is something most men would not have admitted, and which perhaps explains the breakdown of his will at Deraa. Not many men can be this objective about their courage, or admit that they have areas of disabling fear. Every hero fears something,however unlikely or irrational, and Lawrence was no exception: he would rather have been killed than physically touched in any way by another human being. It is hardly surprising to learn that less than four years later Bernard Shaw would base the character of Saint Joan in part on Lawrence; indeed Sir Michael Holroyd writes in his biography of Shaw: “To some degree Seven Pillars of Wisdommay be read as a cross-referring work to Saint Joan:the two chronicles, Stanley Weintraub [a Shaw scholar] has suggested, providing a parallel between the saintly Maid and the ascetic Prince of the desert.” Even Shaw’s physical description of Joan in the play bears a startling resemblance to Lawrence’s face: “an uncommon face: eyes very far apart and bulging as they often do in very imaginative people, a long, well-shaped nose with wide nostrils, a short upper lip, a resolute but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin.” This is a perfect description of Lawrence’s face in Augustus John’s famous 1919 portrait, so much so that it reads like something of a private joke between Shaw and Lawrence, perhaps in payment for a number of suggestions Lawrence offered Shaw about the play.*

The failure to take Amman had consequences. As the bloody stalemate on the western front showed no sign of ending, and the war in the Middle East seemed to have slipped into a similar stalemate, the British government, which had anticipated a surrender by the Turks, began once more to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace. Aubrey Herbert, Sir Mark Sykes’s protйgй in the Arab Bureau, met in neutral Switzerland with Mehmet Talat Pasha, one of the triumvirate who governed Turkey, and the man who had carried out the Armenian genocide. That the British government was willing to negotiate with the most ruthless of the Turkish leaders shows to what extent the fortunes of war had suddenly shifted in Turkey’s favor. The Bolshevik government had been quick to sign a peace treaty with Turkey, freeing it from any further threat to the east and north; the United States had not declared war on the Ottoman Empire; and the French, while anticipating their share of the empire, had made only a minimal contribution to the war in the Middle East—just enough to stake their claim at the peace conference. When it came to Turkey, the British were on their own. They held Basra, Baghdad, and oil-rich Mosul, and Turkey might have been willing to give up the area that is now Iraq in exchange for peace—and a free hand to deal with the Arabs.

Inevitably the news of these negotiations made its way rapidly to the Middle East, further discouraging the Arabs’ confidence in Britain. As a result Feisal’s off-again, on-again secret negotiations with Jemal Pasha grew more intense and specific. If the British were willing to sell out the Arabs and negotiate with Turkey, why should the Arabs not seek the best terms they could get from the Turks? Lawrence seems to have been involved in the correspondence between Feisal and Jemal, or so Jeremy Wilson believes, arguing that “As contacts between the two sides were inevitable, it seemed best to know what was going on,” and that Lawrence hoped in fact to control the correspondence. Given Lawrence’s natural gift for duplicity and his close relationship with Feisal, it was perhaps inevitable for Lawrence to have become involved. In fact, he seems to have been alarmed both by the generosity of the terms Jemal was willing to offer and by Feisal’s interest in them, and he took the extreme step of securing a copy of Jemal’s latest letter “without Feisal’s knowledge,” and passed the information on to Clayton in Cairo.

Lawrence was also involved in an even more delicate matter: Feisal’s reaction to the Balfour Declaration, which was almost more troubling to the Arab leadership than the Sykes-Picot agreement. Nowhere were the words of the declaration parsed with more attention than in the Middle East, where the deliberately ambiguous phrase “a national home for the Jewish people,” so carefully crafted by Balfour and the cabinet* to steer a middle course between the Zionists’ aspirations and the Arabs’ fears, raised more questions than they had in London. In June Clayton arranged a meeting between Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Feisal “at Arab Headquarters.” Clayton had stressed that “It is important that [Lawrence] should be present” at the interview, but Lawrence was up-country with Nasir, so Joyce took his place.

No two men could have been more polite, or more careful to guard their real ambitions from each other, than Feisal and Weizmann (who combined an “almost feminine charm … with a feline deadliness of attack”). But behind their diplomatic discussions about respect for the holy places of other monotheistic faiths, and the benefits that Jewish scientific, industrial, and agricultural knowledge, as well as capital, might bring to a new Arab state, it was apparent that what Hussein and his sons wanted was the maximum Jewish investment with the minimum number of Jewish settlers. Feisal’s goodwill toward the idea of a “Jewish national home” was dependent on his father’s getting everything he had been promised in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915. The implementation of the Balfour Declaration would, in the eyes of the Arab leadership, therefore depend on whether the Sykes-Picot agreement was dropped or enforced. Hussein and his sons were anything but unsophisticated—they were very much aware of European and, more important, American sensitivity on the subject of Jews, a sensitivity which, being Semites themselves, they did not share. They were therefore carefully gracious about an event that they hoped would never happen, or, if it did happen, would take place under Arab political control. Lawrence would later meet with Weizmann in Jerusalem, and would conclude very realistically that whatever he said, Weizmann and his followers wanted a Jewish state, though Lawrence thought it might not happen for another fifty years. (Lawrence was off by twenty years, but he could hardly have predicted the effect the Holocaust would have on the creation of Israel.) Since the Zionists would come “under British colours,” Lawrence was guardedly in favor of them, if only because he thought they might bring Jewish capital into Syria, and thereby thwart French business ambitions.

It is worth noting that even though Lawrence wanted the Arabs to win, and hoped by getting to Damascus first to invalidate the Sykes-Picot agreement, he never forgot that he was a British officer first and foremost, and like many intelligence agents and diplomats before and since he was adept at not letting the right hand know what the left hand was doing. In the end, it was the conflict between his loyalty to Clayton and Hogarth and his loyalty to Feisal and the Arabs that had the most traumatic effect on his character. No man ever tried harder to serve two masters than Lawrence, or punished himself more severely for failing.

On both sides, British and Turkish, there was a certain degree of betrayal in the air. Jemal Pasha, for example, not only was in correspondence with Feisal but sent him a personal emissary in the person of “Mohammed Said, Abd el Kader’s brother in Damascus.” Mohammed Said was the man who was so careless with his automatic pistol as to have killed three friends accidentally. Abd el Kader was the man who had deserted from Lawrence’s force on the way to destroy the bridge over the Yarmuk, and whom Lawrence suspected of having betrayed his mission to the Turks, and of having been responsible for his being picked up shortly afterward at Deraa. Lawrence regarded both brothers as dangerous enemies, and cannot have been pleased to discover that Mohammed Said, of all people, was having secret discussions with Feisal.

The possibility of the Arabs’ changing sides was in the end precluded by two things: the first was King Hussein’s old-fashioned, honorable (and, as it turned out, unreciprocated) scruples about betraying his British ally; the second was the determination of Allenby, who was not nicknamed “the bull” for nothing, to attack again on the grandest possible scale in September. When Lawrence and Dawnay met with Allenby in July, they learned that he wanted them to keep the Turks’ attention focused on Deraa and the Jordan valley while he attacked along the coast toward the end of September—almost the exact opposite of what he had done at Gaza and Beersheba.

Lawrence came up with a number of ways to do this, none of which made him popular with the staff at Aqaba. In particular, Young, who was working night and day to organize a supply line for the Arab regulars as they advanced, was now told to change his plan in favor of Lawrence’s Bedouin irregulars. “Relations between Lawrence and ourselves,” Young wrote, “became for the moment a trifle strained, and the sight of the little man reading Morte d’Arthur* in a corner of the mess tent with an impish smile on his face was not consoling.” No doubt the “impish grin” was partly at Young’s expense—Young was busy drawing up a full tactical plan, with stop lines and exact times, for the benefit of irregulars none of whom had ever owned a watch, and who, if they found good grazing, were as likely as not to stop for a day or two and let the camels eat their fill. Young had changed his original opinion of Lawrence—"Lawrence,” he wrote, “could certainly not have done what he did without the gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount. No amount of pomp and circumstance would have won him the position he gained among Arabs if he had not established himself by sheer force of personality as a born leader and shown himself to be a greater dare-devil than any of his followers.” Lawrence, for his part, had come to admire Young’s dogged effort to deal fairly with the Arabs, his bravery under fire and while laying explosive charges, and his orderly mind; but this is not to say that there was a bond of friendship between Lawrence and his “understudy.”

No doubt it was galling for Young to see Lawrence calmly reading Morte d’Arthurwhile he himself struggled to load onto baggage camels in an orderly way drinking water; forage; and separate rations for the Arab regulars, the British armored car crews, the French gunners, the Egyptian machine gunners, and a unit of Nepalese Gurkhas (all of whom had different tastes in food, in addition to deep religious prejudice against beef on the part of the Gurkhas and against pork on the part of the Arabs and Egyptians). Young was under pressure because Allenby had moved the date of his attack forward by two weeks, and wanted the Arab army to attack “no later than September 16th.” This meant that Young had to prepare two convoys of 600 camels each to carry the army’s supplies “to Aba’l Issan,* seventy miles north of Akaba,” where 450 of the baggage camels would have to be resaddled to serve as riding camels, with saddles that had not yet arrived from Egypt, and then move everything forward to form a permanent base at Azrak. Lawrence’s indifference to all this was not just a pose to irritate Young, though it certainly achieved that effect. Lawrence received his orders straight from Allenby, so he knew that what Allenby really wanted was a demonstration at the right time—Allenby joked that if “three men and a boy with pistols” turned up at Deraa on September 16, they might be enough—rather than a carefully prepared textbook attack that arrived too late.

Because there was intelligence that the Turks were planning a raid on Abu el Lissal, which would badly disrupt Lawrence’s attack on Deraa, Lawrence and Dawnay had arranged to “borrow” two companies of the remaining battalion of the disbanded Imperial Camel Brigade (“on the condition that they should avoid casualties”), march them from Suez to Aqaba across the Sinai (no mean feat to begin with), and from there send them on to attack the watering station at Mudawara again, then make “a long stride” north to Amman, to “destroy the bridge and tunnel there, and then return to Palestine.” This was a tall order for British soldiers, many of them yeoman cavalry, who were not born to the camel or the desert. Lawrence went down to Aqaba to greet them on their arrival, and as they gathered around a blazing campfire, he gave them a rousing speech, which impressed even so hardened an imperial adventurer as Colonel Stirling, the author of Safety Last,who called it “the straightest talk I have ever heard.” Lawrence told them there was no need to worry about the Turks, but to keep in mind that they were entering “a part of Arabia where no white man had ever set foot,” and had every need to worry about the Bedouin, who were “none too friendly,” and would certainly think that the British troops had come to take their grazing grounds. They were “to turn the other cheek,” and avoid any kind of friction.

Lawrence rode with them the next day through Wadi Itm to Rumm. This was just as well, since several of the tribesmen took the opportunity of sniping at the British, even though they were allies. He was moved by riding in the company of British soldiers, a novel experience which filled him with “homesickness, making him feel an outcast.”

Once he had calmed the Howeitat at Rumm, who rumbled with discontent and anger at the presence of infidel soldiers, he rode back to Aqaba, then flew to Jefer to meet with that sinister old chieftain Nuri Shaalan and the Ruawalla sheikhs, whose goodwill he needed to reach Deraa. He settled their doubts with another rousing speech, this time “emphasizing the mystical enchantment of sacrifice for freedom,” then flew back to Guweira, and from there to Aqaba, racked by guilt at having once again persuaded men to risk their lives in the knowledge that they would probably only exchange living under Ottoman rule for life in a French colony.

The news that the 300 troopers of the Imperial Camel Brigade, under Major Buxton, had retaken Mudawara, together with 150 Turkish prisoners, for a loss of seven of their own killed and ten wounded, cheered him up, and he joined them at Jefer, where they were encamped, this time riding in his Rolls-Royce tender Blue Mist,* with an armored car as an escort. From there they moved north, Lawrence riding far ahead of Buxton’s troopers to “smooth the way” for them among the tribesmen, going all the way to Azrak, then returning to Beir to rejoin the troopers. Being among them again gave Lawrence “a mixed sense of ease and unease.” He felt at home among these big men from the rural shires of Britain, but at the same time was conscious of being, in their eyes, both a legendary hero and an oddity. He was afflicted with what Liddell Hart describes as not merely the usual self-doubt, but a growing “distaste for himself,” inevitable in one who accused himself of play-acting among his own admiring countrymen.

A few days later they reached Muaggar, only fifteen miles southeast of Amman, and within easy reach of the railway bridge and tunnel. Here they were discovered by a Turkish airplane. There were Turkish mule-mounted infantrymen near the bridge, and Lawrence, mindful of the fact that he and Dawnay had promised to avoid casualties among the Imperial Camel Brigade, seven of whose troopers had already been killed, decided to send them back to Azrak. They left enough evidence behind them of fires, “empty meat-tins,” and crisscrossing armored car tracks to make the Turks fear that Amman would be attacked.

Leaving his explosives buried at Azrak for future use, Lawrence raced back across the desert to Abu el Lissal to put out a blazing row between King Hussein in Mecca and the officers of the Arab army in the field. This particular tempest in a teacup had been caused by the fact that Jaafar had received a British decoration and had been referred to as “the general commanding the Arab Northern Army,” and King Hussein had thereupon announced in the official Mecca newspaper that no such rank existed. As a result of this insult, all the senior officers of the Arab army resigned, as did Feisal himself after receiving a “vitriolic” message from his father. The fact that most of these ranks were bogus in the first place did not reduce the tension between Abu el Lissal and Mecca. Feisal was styled a lieutenant-general and corps commander by the British, even though on a good day, counting regulars and Bedouin irregulars together, he seldom commanded more than the equivalent of a division; Jaafar Pasha was styled a major-general, although the number of his regulars seldom exceeded that of a brigade; and everyone else was ranked accordingly. It was an army with a disproportionate number of senior officers, and hardly any trained junior officers or NCOs. Lawrence, who had a certain respect for Hussein’s stubborn defense of his own prerogatives as a self-made king, and who was privy to both codes, adopted the novel technique of editing and altering Hussein’s messages to his son, simply eliminating any paragraphs that would offend Feisal, thus saving honor and, more important, avoiding the disintegration of Feisal’s army. Feisal very likely saw through this stratagem, but was wise enough not to question it. The episode also shows the degree to which Lawrence was involved in the politics and the differing ambitions of the sharifian family. For better or worse, he was not only Feisal’s military adviser, but his friend, political counselor, and confidant, the young Thomas а Becket to the young Henry II, with the addition of all the danger of being a foreigner and an unbeliever. Lawrence could play the role of courtier in an eastern court perfectly: as he himself put it, “I could flatter as well as flutter.” His position and his safety depended on Feisal’s trust. He never lost it, and he sacrificed what would have been, to anyone else, a comfortable and well-rewarded career, with every prospect of a knighthood or better, to secure thrones for Feisal and for Feisal’s older brother Abdulla.*

In the meantime, his objective was to get the Arab army and Feisal to Damascus before the British reached it. By the first week of September, “the desert had become a military highway, dotted with northern-moving columns that headed steadily for Azrak.” Lawrence, who rode past the long columns in his Rolls-Royce, had achieved a kind of double deception:the Turks believed that he was aiming for Amman, reinforced it accordingly, and even sent a column farther south to recapture Tafileh; the British believed that he was obeying Allenby’s orders to take Deraa and destroy the vital railroad junction. In fact, Lawrence had begun moving the bulk of the Arab forces away from Medina and the Hejaz, and from Aqaba and the sea, moving north unseen in the desert that only they could cross, toward Damascus. “The climax of the preaching of years had come, and a united country was straining towards its historic capital,” Lawrence wrote, something of an overstatement.

In the meantime, every Turkish soldier sent toward Amman weakened the forces that faced Allenby in the north, and every raid, smashed railway line, or smashed bridge to the south and east kept the Turks looking in the wrong direction. Allenby was a master of bluff—he had used it to persuade the Turks that he would attack Gaza, instead of moving to his right and enveloping Beersheba, and now he used Lawrence to persuade them that the crucial blow was coming from the east side of the Dead Sea toward Amman. Lawrence had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds and countless hours in securing the cooperation, or at least the temporary neutrality, of the tribes from Aqaba to Damascus. In Liddell Hart’s words, “He had removed the obstructions and paved the way,” and this was already something of a miracle. His exact plans were unclear, even to his staff and his superiors. Essentially, he would play cat and mouse with the Turks, hitting them where they least expected; then retreating back into the desert, hoping to destroy the railway junction at Deraa; then moving north from there to take Damascus. But “it was ever [his] habit, while studying alternatives, to keep the stages in solution.” In other words, his plans would remain flexible, and he would exploit opportunities as they arose, having secured a firm base deep in the desert at Azrak.

Ignoring the warning of Frederick the Great—"He who attempts to defend everything, defends nothing"—the Turks attempted to defend everything, in a huge arc from Medina to Maan to the Mediterranean, more than 300 miles long. Reacting violently to every pinprick on the periphery, the Turks were unable to maintain their lines of communication from one day to the next, thanks to Lawrence’s constant sabotage of their railway tracks and bridges.

Allenby compounded their confusion west of the Dead Sea by “creating dust columns with mule-drawn sleighs moving eastward by day, while troop columns marched [back] westward by night,” and by marching battalions toward the Jordan valley by day, then marching them back at night, so the Turks had the impression that Allenby’s whole army—"12,000 sabres, 57,000 rifles, and 540 guns"*—was methodically moving, unit by unit, toward the east. Fifteen thousand dummy horses made of canvas “filled the vacant horse lines in the interior,” forcing the enemy to conclude that the British were preparing to attack in force to the east and take Jericho. Lawrence contributed by buying up all the forage he could find east of the Dead Sea, paying in gold even as the price soared, hiding from nobody the fact that he was buying it to support the British cavalrymen when they crossed the Jordan and advanced northwest toward Damascus.

At dawn on September 14, two days before Allenby’s attack was scheduled, the main body of the Arab forces, “about twelve hundred strong,” marched out of Azrak toward Umtaiye, “a great pit of rain water fifteen miles below Deraa and five miles east of the railway to Amman.” The day before, Lawrence had sent Captain Frederick Peake Pasha, commander of the newly formed Egyptian Camel Corps and an enthusiastic dynamiter, to break the railway near Amman; but Peake’s guides led him straight to a portion of the railway that was guarded by Arabs loyal to the Turks, and he was obliged to withdraw without accomplishing his mission. Had Lawrence been present, he might have won these Arabs over, or bribed them, but he was not. He did not blame Peake, but since he was determined to keep the Arab forces to their schedule he set off for Umtaiye across the desert in the Blue Mist; found a suitable bridge for demolition; then drove back and informed everybody that he would destroy the bridge himself, a “solo effort [which] would be rather amusing.” Young remarked that “it did not sound at all amusing. It sounded quite mad,” but then reflected that Lawrence’s madness had after all enabled him to take Aqaba, and might serve him as well here.

The next day, September 16, Lawrence set out for the railway near Jabir in a Rolls-Royce tender “crammed to the gunwale with gun-cotton [an explosive] and detonators.” He was accompanied by Colonel Joyce, ostensibly his commanding officer, but temporarily reduced to the role of an onlooker; and by Captain Lord Edward Winterton (the future sixth earl, and undersecretary of state for India), an officer from the disbanded Imperial Camel Corps, in a second tender, escorted by two armored cars. When they reached “the cover of the last ridge before the railway, Lawrence transferred himself and 150 lbs. of gun-cotton” to one of the armored cars, and drove straight to the bridge, while the other cars took on the Turkish redoubt protecting the bridge. After a brief firefight, in which two of the Turkish soldiers were killed and the rest surrendered, Lawrence set about the task of mining the bridge, fully justifying Wavell’s description of him as “a fastidious artist in demolitions.”

Despite his disappointment at being unable to remove, as a souvenir, a polished marble plaque with a florid inscription in Turkish, Lawrence proceeded to place his six charges “in the drainage holes of the span-drils … inserted zigzag, and with their explosion all the arches were scientifically shattered.” This demolition was all the more satisfying because it would leave “the skeleton of the bridge intact, but tottering,” so the enemy would “first have to tear down the wreckage before they could begin building a new bridge.” Lawrence was never one to rush the business of placing explosive charges, even under pressure, as he was here, since Winterton and Joyce were waving frantically to signal that enemy patrols were on the way.

After the demolition, he had a moment of dismay when one of the springs of his Rolls-Royce broke, stranding him about 300 yards from the ruined bridge. It was, Lawrence later remarked, the first and only time a Rolls-Royce had broken down in the desert, inconveniently just as the Turkish patrols arrived, leaving him in despair at losing both the car and his explosives kit; but Lawrence and the driver got out, and decided to “jack up the fallen end of the spring, and by scantling [planks] on the running-board wedge it into nearly its old position.” Rolls—the aptly named driver—and Lawrence managed to cut three pieces of wooden scantling to the right length—they had no saw, but Lawrence shot through each piece of wood with his pistol crosswise several times, until they could snap the end off each piece; then they jacked the car up, slipped the scantlings in to replace the spring, lashed them together with rope, and fastened them to the angle irons that held the running board. They then lowered the car back down onto the improvised spring, cranked the engine, and drove on.

Connoisseurs of Lawrence’s prose about machinery—he would later go on to write in great detail about engines, for example in the justly celebrated “User’s Guide and Notes to the 200 Class Royal Air Force Seaplane Tender"—will find a good example on page 720 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence notes that he and Rolls performed this emergency repair as several companies of Turkish infantry were approaching. Apart from his crystal-clear description of how to repair the Rolls-Royce—one almost feels that by following his instructions, one could do it oneself—the passage shows Lawrence’s interest in and aptitude for fine machinery. This was another trait that separated him from other Englishmen of his class and generation, who were mostly happy enough to leave such things to the lower classes: chauffeurs and mechanics. Lawrence loved using his hands, and inventing his own ways of making machines work better; this was unusual, in those days, for a scholar and literary man.

Bouncing and lurching over the desert, they rejoined the main force (and his bodyguard) the next morning, September 17, “just as it was attacking the redoubt that guarded the bridge at Tell Arar.” The Arab regulars stormed the Turkish redoubt, at which point Lawrence “rushed down to find Peake’s Egyptians making breakfast. It was like Drake’s game of bowls and I fell dumb with admiration.” Lawrence, however much he admired their sangfroid, got them away from their breakfast fires and moving again, only to be attacked by Turkish airplanes. One British plane appeared, took on all eight of the Turkish airplanes, and drew them off, though the pilot had to crash-land; and with the kind of “British pluck” that usually appears only in boys’ novels of the period, he removed his machine gun from the wreck, lashed it to a borrowed Ford car, and set off on his own to attack the Turkish troops.

While the Egyptians demolished the bridge, Lawrence and Nuri as-Said (commanding the Arab regulars) set off for the nearest railway station and attacked it, cutting “the telegraph, thus severing the main communication between the Turkish armies and their home-base, before proceeding to dynamite the rails and points and wreck the station and its rolling stock,” all this despite the fact that Lawrence had been wounded by a bomb splinter in the arm. (This did not, apparently, discourage his habit of carrying in his pocket detonators that could have been exploded by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.) Undaunted, he moved his force on to attempt once more to destroy his old target, the railway bridge over the Yarmuk River at Tell el Shehab. Once again, he failed—just as he was about to lay his charges in the dark, a train filled with German reserves halted there. Although Nuri suggested a nighttime bayonet charge, Lawrence, for once cautiously realistic, pulled back, circled around in the desert back to the Deraa-Amman line, and sent a party to distract the Turks by machine-gunning the station at Nisib. Then Lawrence set out to blow up the important bridge north of the station. He was in a hurry now, and when the members of his bodyguard balked at walking out onto the bridge with their loads of blasting gelignite in a sack cast over the shoulder—since the gelignite could be detonated by a single bullet and would then blow them all to pieces—Lawrence set them an example, calmly walking to the center of the bridge by himself to test whether the guards had gone to help defend the station. Once the bodyguards had followed him, he methodically packed his explosives into the bridge’s critical structural points, placed the detonators, and laid the fuses, tumbling into the enemy’s deserted redoubt to set off the explosions. These produced “a lurid blaze,” shattering the abutment arch, sending “the whole mass of masonry sliding slowly down into the valley below,” and showering him with enormous chunks of masonry.

The speed with which Lawrence moved and the unexpected direction of his attacks, along with his habit of “snipping” telegraph wires wherever he could, spread confusion at every level of the Turkish armies on both sides of the Jordan. The action convinced General Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission to Turkey, and now de facto commander of the Turkish forces facing Allenby, whose headquarters was in Nazareth, that when Allenby’s attack came, it would be directed away from the coast and toward the east.

At 4:30 a.m. on September 19, 385 guns opened fire on the Turkish front line in Palestine for fifteen minutes. This firing was followed by a full-scale infantry assault advancing behind a “creeping” artillery barrage that drove the startled Turks from their trenches. So firmly had the Turks been convinced that the assault would be toward the Jordan River that they had thinned out their infantry on the coastal plain, and their defenses quickly crumbled. Ironically, one redoubt held out against the repeated attacks of the small French detachment (approximately of brigade strength), but by 7 a.m. Allenby’s forces had reached all their objectives. (Some divisions advanced “7,000 yards in 2% hours,” a rate of advance unthinkable on the western front.) By midday, the Turkish Eighth Army “had broken in hopeless confusion,” and its demoralized remnants were streaming northwest under constant bombing attack by British aircraft.

Once the infantry had punched a hole in the Turkish line, Allenby poured his cavalry in, en masse, in the Napoleonic manner. For many of the British and Australian troopers, it was the first opportunity to use their newly sharpened sabers in combat. So swift were the Turkish collapse and the British advance that the Thirteenth Brigade of the British Fifth Cavalry Division clattered into Nazareth at dawn on September 20, almost forty miles north of its starting point, forcing an astonished General von Sanders, whose lines of communication had been so deftly cut by Lawrence, and who therefore had no idea of the extent of his army’s disintegration, to flee from his headquarters—which was being defended by staff officers with carbines and by “clerks, orderlies, etc.” firing from the windows—to avoid capture. By the end of the day the advance scouts of Allenby’s cavalry were approaching the Jordan River, just south of the Sea of Galilee, while his infantry was wheeling away from the coast into the hills of Samaria, to take Nablus. Some idea of what conditions were like can be gleaned from the official military handbook for Palestine, which notes, “Nothing is known of the climate [of the Jordan Valley] in summer time, since no human being has yet been found to spend summer there.”

“Early on September 21st,” Liddell Hart wrote, “British aircraft sighted a large column [of Turks] winding down the steep gorge from Nablus towards the Jordan…. Four hours’ continuous bombing and machine-gunning by relays of aircraft reduced this procession to stagnation, and inanimate chaos of guns and transport.” Everywhere, the story was the same. The Turkish Seventh and Eighth armies, west of the Jordan, had for all intents and purposes ceased to exist except as isolated mobs of starving, unarmed men, desperate to surrender. The strongest Turkish force, the Fourth Army, east of the Jordan, was also rapidly losing cohesion. Lawrence had disabled the railroad, so the troops were forced to retreat on foot, without water, rations, or forage for the animals, and exposed to “constant pinpricks” by the Bedouin, who swept out of the desert to shoot and plunder the stragglers and the wounded. Haifa, with its vital port, was captured on September 23 by a bold cavalry advance around both sides of Mount Carmel, carried out by two Indian regiments of the Fifth (Imperial) Cavalry Division, the Mysore and the Jodhpur Lancers, with the addition of a squadron of the Sherwood Rangers, effectively placing every major city in Palestine in British hands.

At this point, the main danger to the Arab forces was from the air, since Allenby did not have enough aircraft to provide what would later come to be called “air cover” over the vast area of the Arab advance. The Arabs were still particularly sensitive to being bombed or machine-gunned from the air. This no doubt explains Lawrence’s hastily improvised raid on an advance Turkish landing field on his way back to Azrak;

during this raid, his armored car was bombed, sending a shower of broken stone through the vision slit, wounding his hand, blowing off a tire, and nearly overturning the vehicle in a ditch. He complained of “feeling like sardines in a doomed tin,” and remarked, “Of all dangers give me the solitary sort.” But although he had gone five nights without sleep, he pressed on to provide cover for another railway demolition, then carried out a nighttime “running fight” between his armored cars and a Turkish train, racing alongside the track in the darkness “lit up by the green shower of tracer bullets.”

On September 21 Lawrence reached Azrak, where an airplane landed early the next morning to bring him news of Allenby’s victory on the west bank of the Jordan. He immediately suggested that Feisal should set in motion “the long-delayed general revolt in Syria.” This was a significant decision. Both Feisal and Lawrence had discouraged any large-scale uprising in Syria, so long as there was any danger of the Turks’ gaining the upper hand, as they had done in March and April, when Allenby had been driven back from Amman and Salt. Any rising under those circumstances would simply lead to savage and widespread executions by the Turks. This time, however, it was clear that the Turks had been completely defeated, and that the only question was whether the remnants of the Turkish Fourth Army could reach Damascus before the British cavalry or the Arabs did. To Lawrence, what mattered now was to take advantage of the loophole in the Sykes-Picot agreement, the somewhat ambiguous language acknowledging that the Arabs might keep those territories they themselves captured during the course of the war. A careful parsing of the documents would also reveal that everything in them was subject to French claims, and the French had already claimed Lebanon and Syria (including Damascus). Still, Lawrence hoped that if the Arabs captured Damascus and a Syrian government was installed there before the British arrived, the world—and particularly the United States—might accept a fait accompli and might also accept the British government’s view, which was that the Sykes-Picot agreement was a “dead letter,” and superseded by events. He hoped, too, that the fall of the imperial Russian government,the unexpected strength of the Arab contribution to victory, and Woodrow Wilson’s demand for an end to secret treaties—and to European colonial acquisitions made without the consent of native populations—would prevail over the agreement. It was a slim reed on which to build a nation, as both Lawrence and Feisal recognized, particularly since urban Syrians were, as they still are, sharp and sophisticated traders, whereas rural Syrians were for the most part peasant farmers, few of them likely to greet with pleasure a government by King Hussein, or by his son Feisal.

In the morning, Lawrence flew directly to Ramleh, and drove from there to General Allenby’s headquarters in Palestine, where he “found the great man at work in his office unmoved” by the magnitude of his victory. Allenby personally briefed Lawrence on the next stage of his advance—the Australian Mounted Division (Major-General W. G. Hodgson) and the Fifth Cavalry Division (Major-General H. J. M. Mac Andrew) would turn north of the Sea of Galilee and advance on Damascus, while the Fourth Cavalry Division (Major-General Sir G. deS. Barrow) would strike east to capture Deraa, and then turn north toward Damascus. From one point of view, all this was welcome news to Lawrence—Allenby would shortly reach Damascus, very likely forcing the Turkish government to sue for peace. From another point of view, it meant that Lawrence’s hope of an independent Arab state in Syria depended on getting Feisal and the Arab forces into Damascus before Allenby’s cavalry divisions arrived—a very narrow window of opportunity. Allenby, always well informed, was aware of this, and in fact strictly warned Lawrence against attempting an “independent coup” in Damascus; the Arab forces, Allenby told him, should cooperate with the British Fourth Cavalry Division to cut off the retreat of the Turkish Fourth Army, and let the British and Australian forces deal with Damascus and move on. On the subject of air cover, Allenby was more generous; he agreed to provide the latest Bristol fighters to operate from the airstrip Lawrence had created in the desert at Umtaiye, about forty miles south of Deraa, and since there was no fuel there, to provide a giant Handley-Page bomber, the first to reach the Middle East, to shuttle back and forth loaded with cans of gas.

Lawrence swiftly integrated the pilots and their aircraft into his strategy. He happily shared his young pilots’ breakfast of tea and sausages,* cooked over an open fire, something of a deviation from his usual vegetarian meals, and watched them shoot down a German two-seater, the wreckage of which he would later pass, “noting the two charred German bodies.” They flew back to Azrak, then traveled northwest with Feisal and that sinister old chieftain Nuri Shaalan—"packed into the green Vauxhall, which its British soldier, proud of his prince to drive, kept always spick and shining,” no mean feat in the desert—to Um el Surab, about fifty miles from Deraa. At Um el Surab, Nuri as-Said had prepared a landing ground big enough for the Handley-Page bomber. Unfortunately, they had to turn away to settle yet another of the endless intertribal disputes and so missed the great airplane’s landing. But later a single wild-eyed Bedouin riding in the opposite direction shouted that he had just seen “the biggest aeroplane in the world,” a report which quickly spread throughout all the tribes south of Deraa, and impressed the Bedouin even more than the news of Allenby’s victories. At Um el Surab they found the Handley, “majestic on the grass with the Bristols … like chickens beneath the spread of its wings.” The sight prompted the Arabs to say, “ ‘Indeed and at last they have sent us the aeroplane, of which these little things were the asses.’ “ Even the most skeptical tribesmen were now convinced that the Turks were done for.

The Handley-Page contained enough gas, spare parts for the aircraft, and food for the air force personnel to enable Lawrence to have his own small air force east of the Jordan, and also to provide his cars with enough fuel to get them to Damascus. At night the big aircraft would be used to bomb Mafrak and Deraa, further disrupting the Turkish Fourth Army’s line of retreat.

on September 23, Lawrence rested, and therefore missed the sight of old Nuri Shaalan charging the Turks on the railway line, as he “personally led his Rualla horsemen, galloping in his black broadcloth cloak with the best of them.” The next day Lawrence attacked the railway line again, but this time he was driven off by unexpectedly vigorous and accurate machine gun fire, from a German army unit, as it turned out. It did not much matter; at that point the entire Turkish Fourth Army was in hopeless and disordered retreat, becoming a mob of hungry, thirsty, unarmed stragglers, except for islands of discipline where small German units were retreating with them. Turks began throwing away their rifles, and cutting the horses loose of the guns they were pulling in order to ride them.

This sight of all this misery stretching from south of Amman almost to Damascus led to a sharp quarrel between Lawrence and Young, who with his gift for the non-U* phrase or word held what he called a “powwow” in Lawrence’s tent, where the atmosphere was not improved by Lawrence’s languid flippancy and Young’s belief that he was the one in command. Young “still regarded him more as Feisal’s liaison officer with General Allenby than as a real Colonel in the army, a position which he gave the impression of holding in great contempt.” It would dawn on him only later that Lawrence was under the opposite impression—that hewas in command of Young. Young felt that the Arabs had by now done all that Allenby had asked, and that they should at all costs avoid putting themselves between Deraa and the Turkish line of retreat, since they were on the flank of an army more than twenty times their strength. He felt that the right thing to do was to “worry the Fourth Army as it passed … and to wait for the 4th [British] division,” to appear. As a regular officer, he felt he knew more about this kind of thing than Lawrence, whose respect for regular soldiers was in any case limited. Lawrence also seems to have been at his most annoying—Young almost invariably brought out the worst in him—and was determined to cross the railway. He did not think the Turks would fight. More important, although Young might think that the war in Turkey was as good as won, Lawrence was determined to get to Damascus, whatever it cost—something he could hardly reveal to Young.

Lawrence won the argument by default, saying that he was going to sleep, since he intended to cross the railway line with his bodyguard at dawn and “reach Sheikh Saad by daylight,” with or without the Arab regulars. Nuri as-Said, who commanded the Arab regulars, had been curled up in the tent pretending to be asleep; he merely asked, “Is it true?” once Young had “gone away grumbling,” and when Lawrence said it was, nodded. At dawn they rode off with Lawrence’s bodyguard and were soon joined by Auda, Nasir, Nuri Shaalan, and Talal, and their large bodies of irregular Bedouin. With Lawrence’s blessing, Auda, Nuri, and Talal split up and each raided a separate place: Nuri and his men rode down the main road to Deraa and Damascus to pick up prisoners; Auda went to take the station at “Ghazale by storm, capturing a derelict train, with guns and two hundred men, of whom some were Germans"; and Talal took Ezraa, which was defended by Lawrence’s old foe, Abd el Kader, and his Algerian followers. To Lawrence’s regret Abd el Kader fled, but by the time the irregulars reassembled at Sheikh Saad, they were burdened with loot, machine guns, and prisoners. On September 27 an English aircraft flew low over them and dropped a message that Bulgaria had surrendered, the first of the Central Powers to do so. The Arab regulars arrived soon afterward, having taken nine hours to cover a distance that Lawrence and his bodyguard covered in three. With them were Young, whose feelings were still bruised; and Lord Winterton, who seems to have been at his happiest when raiding the railway, rather than attempting to keep the peace between his two quarrelsome superiors.

A British aircraft dropped a warning that two very large columns of Turks were moving toward Sheikh Saad—one of 4,000 and the other of 2,000. Lawrence decided to take on the smaller one, which was approaching Talal’s village, Tafas. He moved off at once, leaving Young behind.

Because “kindly” Winterton had ordered Young’s tent pitched beside his own “in a little dell some distance away from the Sherifian officers, thinking that I should like to be undisturbed,” Young, who was so tired that “he could hardly keep [his] eyes open,” fell asleep and woke up to an empty, silent camp, with just a few men left to guard the prisoners. He therefore missed the scene that would haunt Lawrence for the rest of his life.

Riding toward Tafas, Lawrence encountered “mounted Arabs, herding a drove of stripped prisoners towards Sheikh Saad … driving them mercilessly, the bruises of their urging blue across the ivory backs.” These were the Turks of the police battalion at Deraa, being whipped savagely by Arabs whom they themselves had often whipped. Lawrence recognized some of them from his own punishment at their hands at Deraa, and he had “his own account” to settle with them. He rode on faster, hearing that a regiment of Turkish lancers had already entered Tafas, from which smoke was rising. As with Lawrence’s description of his own torture in Deraa, it is best to present Tafas in his own words—this account and the execution of Gasim before Aqaba and the incident at Deraa are the three most extraordinary and grueling passages in Seven-Pillars of Wisdom;and certainly the description of Tafas, along with the Battle of Tafileh, justifies placing Lawrence among the great writers about war.

When we got within sight, we found their news true. They had taken the village (from which sounded an occasional shot), and were halted about it. Small pyres of smoke were going up between the houses. On the rising ground to this side, knee deep in dried thistles, stood a distressed remnant of the inhabitants, old men, women and children, telling terrible stories of what had happened when the Turks rushed in an hour before.

It was too late to do anything but hope for the others, so we lay there on watch, crawling down through the thistles till we were quite near and saw the enemy re-form close column to march out in an

orderly body towards Miskin, cavalry in front and in the rear, infantry and machine-guns as a flank-guard, guns and transport in the centre. We opened fire on the head of their line when it showed itself beyond the houses. They made an active return from two field guns, unlimbered behind the village. Their shrapnel was over-fused, and passed above us into the rough.

At last Nuri came with Pisani. Before their ranks rode Auda Abu Tayi, expectant, and Talal nearly frantic with the tales his people poured out of the sufferings of the village. The Turks were now nearly quit of it, and we slipped down behind them to end Talal’s suspense, while our infantry took position and fired strongly with the Hotchkiss, and the French high-explosive threw their rearguard into confusion.

The village lay there stilly before us, under the slow wreaths of white smoke, as we rode to it guardedly. Some grey heaps seemed to hide in the long grass, embracing the ground in that close way which corpses had. These we knew were dead Arab men and women: but from one a little figure tottered off, as though to escape from us. It was a child, three or four years old, whose dirty smock was stained red all over one shoulder and side. When near we saw that it was blood from a large half-fibrous wound, perhaps a lance thrust, just where neck and body joined.

The child ran a few steps, then stood still and cried to us in a tone of astonishing strength (all else being very silent), “Don’t hit me, Baba.” Abd el Aziz, choking out something—this was his village, and she might be of his family—flung himself off his camel, and stumbled, kneeling in the grass beside the child. His suddenness frightened her, for she threw up her arms and tried to scream: but instead dropped in a little heap, while the blood rushed out again over the clothes: and then, I think, she died.

We left Abd el Aziz there, and rode on past the other bodies, of men and women, and four more dead babies, looking very soiled in the clear daylight, towards the village whose loneliness we now knew meant that it was full of death and horror. On the outskirts were some low mud walls, of sheepfolds, and on one lay something red and white. I looked close and saw the body of a woman folded across it, bottom upwards, nailed there by a saw bayonet whose haft stuck hideously into the air from between her naked legs. She had been pregnant, and about her lay others, perhaps twenty in all, variously killed, but set out in accord with an obscene taste.

The Zaagi burst out in wild peals of laughter, and those who were not sick joined him hysterically. It was a sight near madness, the more desolate for the warm sunshine and the clear air of this upland afternoon. I said, “The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead,” and we turned and rode after the fading enemy, on our way shooting down those who had fallen out by the road-side and came imploring our pity. One wounded Turk, half-naked, not able to stand, sat and cried to us. Abdulla turned away his camel’s head: but the Zaagi crossed him, and whipped three bullets from his revolver through the man’s bare chest. The blood came out with his heart beats, throb, throb, throb, slower and slower.

Talal had seen what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal, and then rode heavily to the upper ground and sat there a long while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved near to speak to him, and lead his mind away: but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. After some minutes Talal very slowly drew his headcloth about his face, and then seemed to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into his horse’s flanks, and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy.

It was a long ride, down the gentle slope, and across the hollow, and we sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of the hoofs sounding unnaturally loud in our ears, for we had stopped shooting and the Turks had stopped shooting. Both armies waited for him, and he flew on in the hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war cry, “Talal, Talal,” twice in a tremendous shout. instantly their rifles and machine-guns crashed out together, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among their lance points.

Auda looked very cold and grim. “God give him mercy: we will take his price.” He shook his rein, and moved slowly forward after the enemy. We called up the peasants, now drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and that against the retreating columns. Auda led them like the old lion of battle that he was. By a skilful turn he drove the Turks into bad ground, and split their formation into three parts.

The third part—the smallest—was mostly made up of German and Austrian machine-gunners grouped round three motor-cars, which presumably carried high officers. They fought magnificently and repulsed our attacks time and again despite our hardiness. The Arabs were fighting like devils, the sweat blurring their eyes, dust parching their throats: while the flame of cruelty and revenge which was burning in their bodies so twisted them about that their hands could hardly shoot. By my orders we took no prisoners, for the only time in the war.

At last we left this stern section behind us, though they said it held Sherif Bey, commanding the lancers: and pursued the faster two. They were in panic, and by sunset we had destroyed the smallest pieces of them, gaining as and by what they lost. Parties of peasants flowed in on our advance, each man picking up his arms from the enemy. At first there were five or six to every rifle: then one would put forth a bayonet; another a sword; a third a pistol. An hour later, those who had been on foot would be on donkeys. Afterwards every man would have a rifle, and the most other arms as well. At last all were on captured horses. Before nightfall the horses were heavy-laden, and the rich plain behind us was scattered over with the dead bodies of men and animals.

There lay on us a madness, born of the horror of Tafas or of its story, so that we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and running blood could slake the agony in our brains.

Just one group of Arabs, who had been to the side all day, and had not heard our news, took prisoners, the last two hundred men of the central section. That was all to survive, and even their respite was short. I had gone up to learn why it was, not unwilling that this remnant be let live as witnesses of Talal’s price: but while I came, a man on the ground behind them screamed something to the Arabs who with pale faces led me down to see. It was one of us, his thigh shattered. The blood had rushed out over the red soil, and left him dying, but even so he had not been spared. In the fashion of today’s battle he had been further tormented, bayonets having been hammered through his shoulder and other leg into the ground, pinning him out like a collected insect.

He was fully conscious, and we said, “Hassan, who did it?” He dropped his eyes towards the prisoners, standing there so hopelessly broken. We ranged our Hotchkiss on them, and pointed to him silently. They said nothing in the moment before we opened fire: and at last their heap ceased moving, and Hassan was dead, and we mounted again and rode home slowly (home was just my carpet at Sheikh Saad) in the gloom which felt so chill now that the sun had gone down.

However, I found that I could not rest or speak or eat for thinking of Talal, the splendid leader, the fine horseman, the courteous and strong companion of the road: and after a while had my other camel brought, and, with one of my bodyguard, rode out in the night towards Sheikh Miskin, to join our men who were hunting the great Deraa column, and learn how they had fared.

It was very dark with a wind beating in great gusts from the south and east, and only by the noise of shots it tossed across to us, and by occasional gun-flashes did we at length come to the fighting. Every field and valley had its Turks, stumbling blindly northward. Our men were clinging on tenaciously. The fall of night had made them bolder, and they were closing with the enemy, firing into them at short range. Each village as its turn came took up the work, and the black icy wind was wild with rifle shots and shoutings, volleys from the Turks, and gallops as small parties of one or other side crashed frantically together.

The enemy had tried to halt and camp at sunset, but Khalid had shaken them into movement again. Some had marched, some had stayed. As they went many dropped asleep in their tracks with fatigue: They had lost all order and coherence, and were drifting through the storm in lost packets, ready to shoot and run, at every contact with us or with each other, and the Arabs were as scattered, and nearly as uncertain.

Exceptions were the German detachments, and here for the first time I grew proud of the enemy who had killed my brothers. They were marching for their homes two thousand miles away, without hope and without guides, in conditions mad enough to break the bravest nerves. Yet each section of them held together, marching in firm rank, sheering through the wrack of Turk and Arab like an armoured ship, dark, high set, and silent. When attacked they halted, faced about, took position, fired to order. There was no haste, no crying, no hesitation. They were glorious.

After many encounters at last I found Khalid, and asked him to call off all possible Rualla, and leave this routed enemy to time and the peasantry. Heavier work, perhaps lay to the southward. There had been a rumour, at dusk, that Deraa was empty, and Trad with the rest of the Anazeh had ridden off to make sure. I feared a reverse for him, since there must still be men in the place, and more struggling towards it up the railway and through the Iibid hills, in hope of safety there. Indeed unless Barrow had lost contact with his enemy there must be that fighting rearguard yet to follow. Disaster in this eleventh hour was possible:—almost likely for the Arabs in their distracted situation, and I wanted Khalid to go help his brother with what fellows he could collect from the night battle.

He agreed at once, and after an hour or two of shouting his message down the wind, hundreds of horsemen and camel-men had rallied to him. On his way to Deraa he charged through and over several formed detachments of Turks, in the star-blink, and arrived to find Trad in secure possession. He had won it at dusk, taking the station at a whirlwind gallop, jumping the trenches, and blotting out the scanty elements that still tried to resist.

Then, with the help of the local people, they had plundered all the camp, especially finding booty in the fiercely burning storehouses, which the German troops had fired when they left. They entered them and snatched goods from beneath their flaming roofs at peril of their lives: but this was one of the nights in which mankind went crazy, when death seemed impossible however many died to the right and left, and when others’ lives seemed just toys to break and throw away.

Meanwhile Sheikh Saad passed a troubled evening, all alarms and shots and shouts, threatenings to murder the prisoners of the day as added price of Talal and his village. The active Sheikhs were out with me or hunting the Turks, and their absence and the absence of their retainers deprived the Arab camp of its chiefs and of its eyes and ears. The sleeping clan-jealousies had come to life in the blood-thirst of the afternoon of killing, and Nasir and Nuri Said, Young and Winterton, were up nearly all the time, keeping the peace.

I got in long after midnight, and found Trad’s messengers just arrived with news of Deraa. Nasir left at once to join him. I had wished to sleep, for this was my fourth night of riding: but my mind would not be still enough to feel how tired my body was; so about two in the morning I mounted a third camel, and splashed out towards Deraa, down the Tafas track again, passing to windward of the dark village and its plangent, miserable women.

Nuri Said and his Staff were riding the same road, and our parties hurried along together till the half-light came. Then my impatience and the cold would not let me travel horse-pace any longer. I gave liberty to my camel, the grand but rebellious Baha, and she stretched herself out against all the field, racing the other camels for mile upon mile with great piston-strides like an engine, so I entered Deraa quite alone in the full dawn. There have been disputes from time to time over whether Lawrence actually ordered the Arabs to take no prisoners, or was merely unable to stop them from killing the Turks and Germans they found, but the text makes it clear that he gave the order. Once this order was given, it became difficult, if not impossible, to rein in the tribesmen, and the killing was soon beyond his control. The bloodletting reawakened the feuds and the hostility between Arab clans and tribes, so that Young and Winterton had their hands full attempting to maintain peace at the encampment, while Lawrence rode on through the night to Deraa.

His bodyguard soon joined him there, and shortly afterward he ran into the first of Allenby’s troops, Indian cavalry troopers of the Fourth Cavalry Division manning a neatly ordered machine gun post, who at first wanted to take Lawrence prisoner. This was the first significant meeting of Allenby’s troops advancing eastward from Palestine and the Arab army marching north toward Damascus, and neither force was impressed with the other. To the British, the Arab irregulars seemed like armed and “liberated” natives running amok, while the Arabs were not impressed by the spit and polish of the Indian troopers or the severe discipline imposed on them by their officers. Lawrence remembers that when he rode on to meet Major-General Barrow, the meeting was something less than a success. To begin with, Barrow was a confirmed believer in strict discipline, who had published an article before the war in which he argued that fear of his superior officers was the best motivating force for a soldier, a point of view to which Lawrence was temperamentally opposed. Then, Lawrence thought Barrow had advanced too cautiously, stopping to water his horses too often, and saw no reason why Barrow should think it was his job to take Deraa when the Arabs already had possession of it. He took a certain pleasure in the fact that the presence of his camel made Barrow’s horse “plunge and buck” as they rode together into Deraa.

Barrow’s own memory of meeting Lawrence was dramatically different. First of all, Barrow denies that he rode into town with Lawrence at all, and says they met for the first time at the railway station, opposite the sharifian headquarters. Wherever they met, Barrow was already in a state of high indignation. He was shocked by the condition of the town and the Arabs’ open looting. “The whole place,” he wrote, “was indescribably filthy, defiled and littered with smouldering cinders and the soiled leavings of loot. Turks, some dead and some dying, lay about the railway station or sat propped against the houses. Those still living gazed at us with eyes that begged for a little of the mercy of which it was hopeless of them to ask of the Arabs, and some cried feebly for water…. In all this there was nothing that was uncommon in war. But a revolting scene was being enacted at the moment when we entered, far exceeding in its savagery anything that has been known in the conflicts between nations during the past 120 years and happily rare even in earlier times.

“A long ambulance train full of sick and wounded Turks was drawn up in the station. In the cab of the engine was the dead driver and a mortally wounded fireman. The Arab soldiers were going through the train, tearing off the clothing of the groaning and stricken Turks, regardless of gaping wounds and broken limbs, and cutting their victims’ throats…. It was a sight that no average civilised human being could bear unmoved.

“I asked Lawrence to remove the Arabs. He said he couldn’t ‘as it was their idea of war.’ I replied ‘It is not our idea of war, and if you can’t remove them, I will.’ He said, ‘If you attempt to do that I shall take no responsibility as to what happens.’ I answered ‘That’s all right; I will take responsibility,’ and at once gave orders for our men to clear the station. This was done and nothing untoward happened.”

Lawrence seems to have felt that he got the best of Barrow, and thought he had confused the general by his “exotic dress and Arab companions.” Reading Barrow’s account of Deraa in the hands of the Arab army, one is not so sure. Barrow knew that Lawrence enjoyed Allenby’s confidence, but his feeling seems to have been basically that of a major-general who thinks a temporary lieutenant-colonel is not doing his job properly. As for Lawrence’s attitude toward Barrow, it may have been at least in part colored by his dislike of Indian troops; he confessed to sharing the Arabs’ disdain for them: “At least my mind seemed to feel in the Indian troops something puny and confined … so unlike the abrupt, wholesome Beduin of our joyous Army,” he wrote. But his “joyous Army” was busy looting and cutting the throats of the Turkish wounded, and what Lawrence dismissed as “subservience” may merely have been the behavior of trained, professional troops who knew the meaning of the phrase “good order and discipline.” However, allowance should probably be made for what Lawrence had gone through in the past forty-eight hours.

Years later, after the war, when Barrow and Allenby were chatting in the study of Allenby’s London house, Allenby, according to Barrow, “tapped The Seven Pillars of Wisdomin his bookshelf and said: ‘Lawrence goes for you in his book, George.’ I replied to the effect that I was not taking any notice of it, and he said, ‘No, that would be a mug’s game. Besides, we know Lawrence. He thinks himself a hell of a soldier and loves posturing in the limelight.’ “ Of course we have no way of knowing if this conversation took place in exactly those words, or the degree to which Allenby was merely putting Barrow, a fellow general who was a guest in his home, at ease; but one suspects it is another example of the fact that Lawrence’s dislike of regular soldiers was reciprocated to some degree by most of them, and that even Allenby’s unwavering support may have faded ever so slightly after the taking of Damascus.

In any case, the conversation between Barrow and Lawrence at the railway station in Deraa set the tone for the future relationship between the British and Arab armies now that they had at last met east of the Jordan. Lawrence left Deraa and camped out in the open for the night with his bodyguard, for the last time; then at dawn he set out for Damascus in his Rolls-Royce with Major W. F. Stirling, who was wearing khaki and an Arab headdress. The road was blocked by Barrow’s rear guard, so Lawrence had Rolls, his driver, take the car to the old French railway, from which the Turks had stripped the rails, and they drove over the gravel ballast as fast as they could. At noon, Lawrence saw Barrow and his staff watering their horses, so he switched from the Rolls-Royce to a camel and rode over to annoy Barrow further. Barrow, it seemed, had expressed the natural belief of a cavalryman that the horse travels faster than the camel, and was astonished to see that Lawrence’s camel had caught up with him. He asked when Lawrence had left Deraa. “I said, ‘This morning,’ and his face fell. ‘Where will you stop tonight?’ was his next question. ‘Damascus,’ said I gaily and rode on, having made another enemy."* Lawrence was perfectly right about that. Barrow would not forget him, and since he survived Lawrence long enough to serve in the Home Guard in 1940, and did not write his memoirs until the end of World War II, he managed to have the last word. In any case, Lawrence was about to infuriate a good many more people on his way to Damascus, and after he arrived there.

Lawrence continued to be irked by the methodical advance of Barrow’s division, with forward scouts and a cavalry screen thrown out in the regulation positions, since he had been told there were no cohesive Turkish forces between here and Damascus—information which, even if he considered it true, he apparently did not pass on to Barrow. That it was actually nottrue seems borne out by the fact that about halfway to Damascus Lawrence found Nasir, Nuri Shaalan, Auda, and their tribesmen attacking a large column of Turks, who were putting up an orderly resistance. Since the Turks had mountain guns and machine guns, Lawrence drove back to seek support from Barrow’s leading cavalry regiment. He encountered an “ancient, surly” colonel of the Indian army who very reluctantly “upset the beautiful order of his march” by sending a squadron to attack the Turks, only to withdraw them when the Turks opened fire. Since he had promised the Arabs British support, Lawrence was furious, and turned back to find one of Barrow’s brigadier-generals, who sent in the horse artillery and the Middlesex Yeomanry, which succeeded in making the Turks abandon their guns and transport, and stream into the desert. There, “Auda was waiting for them, and in that night of his last battle against the Turks the deadly old man killed and killed, plundered and plundered, captured and captured, till dawn came and showed him his work was finished.” These were the last remnants of the Turkish Fourth Army, and when Auda had put an end to them, all meaningful Turkish resistance from Damascus south ceased.

Lawrence spent the night in Kiswe, only a few miles from Damascus; and the next day he consulted with Nasir and Nuri Shaalan, and “decided to send the Rualla horse galloping into town,” to alert Feisal’s supporters and Ali Riza Pasha, the governor of Damascus, who was a secret supporter of Feisal’s, that the Arab army was on its way. Allenby had told Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Chauvel, who commanded the Desert Mounted Corps, to let the Arabs go into Damascus first if possible, and with that in mind Chauvel had ordered the Australian Mounted Division to swing around the city and cut the railway line leading to Aleppo in the north and to Beirut in the west. During the day British and Arab forces mixed together outside the city, and Lawrence was anxious that an Arab government should be in place before any British troops entered Damascus. That night he succeeded in sending another 4,000 mounted tribesmen into the city, to support the Rualla sheikhs; then he waited, sleepless, through a breathlessly hot night, illuminated by fires and explosions in Damascus as the Germans blew up their ammunition dumps and stores. At dawn he drove to a ridge and looked out over the city, afraid that he would see it in ruins. Instead, he saw a green oasis of silent gardens shrouded in early morning mist, with only a few columns of black smoke rising from the night’s explosions. As he drove down toward the city, through green fields, a single horseman galloped up the road toward him. Seeing Lawrence’s head cloth, the horseman held out “a bunch of yellow grapes, shouting: ‘Good news: Damascus salutes you,’ “ and told him that his friends held the city.

Lawrence had urged Nasir and Nuri Shaalan to ride into the city before him. He was then temporarily halted by an importunate Indian army NCO who attempted to take him prisoner, and finally drove into Damascus along the long boulevard on the west bank of the Barada River toward the government buildings. People were packed solid along the road, on the pavement, on the roofs and balconies of the houses, and at every window. Many shouted Lawrence’s name as they glimpsed the small Englishman in a dark cloak and a white robe and headdress with a golden agal,seated beside his driver in the dusty open Rolls-Royce. “A movement like a breath, in a long sigh from gate to heart of the city, marked our course,” Lawrence wrote, and it was perhaps the proudest moment of his life, the culmination of what had begun just two years earlier when he set out to meet Feisal in the desert.

Whatever pleasure Lawrence may have allowed himself to feel at the taking of Damascus, or at the cheers from those in the crowds who recognized him, was soon erased by the scene that met him at the town hall. The building was mobbed by people dancing, weeping, and shouting for joy; but once he had pushed his way inside to the antechamber, he found a noisy chaos of political rivalry and old feuds boiling over. The leading figures among the Damascenes and the Bedouin were seated at a crowded table, with their followers behind them, all of them armed, all in furious dispute. Seated at the center of the table was Lawrence’s old enemy Abd el Kader and his brother Mohammed Said, on either side of the respected old anti-Turk hero Shukri Pasha el Ayubi, who had been arrested and tortured by Jemal Pasha in 1916. Abd el Kader was shouting at the top of his voice that he, Shukri, and his brother had formed a provisional government and proclaimed Hussein king of the Arabs, even though until yesterday the brothers had been with the Turks. The two brothers had brought their Algerian followers with them and used them to break into the meeting and seize control of it.* Since Lawrence believed that Abd el Kader had betrayed his attempt to destroy the bridge over the Yarmuk and also given the Turks a description of himself that had led to his being stopped at Deraa, he was infuriated; but before he could do anything about it, a furious fight broke out in front of the table, chairs went flying, and a familiar voice shouted in such violent rage that it silenced the whole room. In the center of an angry mob of their followers Auda Abu Tayi and the Druse chieftain Sultan el Atrash, old enemies, tore and clawed at each other until Lawrence “jumped in to drive them apart.” Sultan el Atrash was pushed into another room, while Lawrence dragged Auda, “blind with rage,” into the empty state room of the town hall. Sultan el Atrash had hit Auda in the face with a stick, and Auda was determined “to wash out the insult with Druse blood.” Lawrence managed to calm Auda down, and to hustle Sultan el Atrash out of town. He then decided to make Shukri the temporary military governor of Damascus until Ali Riza Rejabi returned and Feisal arrived and sorted matters out. When he announced this to Abd el Kader and his brother, they “took it rather hard, and had to be sent home,” though not before Abd el Kader “in a white heat of passion” had lunged at Lawrence with a drawn dagger, only to be stopped from using it by the intervention of Auda. Lawrence briefly contemplated having the two brothers arrested and shot, but decided that it would be a mistake to begin Arab rule in Syria with a political execution. The entire town was now in a combination of frenzied celebration and open political agitation, with the two brothers and their Algerian followers clearly bent on seizing control before Feisal or the British reached Damascus.

Triumph: Lawrence, in the Blue Mist, arrives in Damascus.

The arrival of Lieutenant-General Chauvel added to Lawrence’s burdens. Like General Barrow at Deraa, Chauvel was shocked and appalled by the disorder in Damascus, anxious to assert order as quickly as possible, and infuriated to discover that the city appeared to be in the hands of a comparatively junior officer dressed in Arab clothing. Some of Chauvel’s Australian horsemen had entered the city the day before, on October 1, despite Allenby’s order, and Chauvel therefore believed that he, not Lawrence and the Arabs, had taken Damascus. He expected to make “a formal entry” into the city, with a parade the next day; and it is clear enough from Lawrence’s account of their conversation that Lawrence not only attached no great importance to Chauvel’s wish, but was pulling his leg—something that Chauvel no doubt recognized, though he was not amused. He considered himself honor-bound to receive the formal surrender of the city from the wali,the Turkish military governor. Lawrence told him that Shukri Pasha was the man, but did nottell him, until later in the day, that the “original” Turkish walihad fled and that he, Lawrence, had only just appointed Shukri to replace this man. When Chauvel learned this, he felt that he had been tricked, and warned Lawrence that he “could not recognize the King of the Hedjaz in this matter without further instructions.”

In retrospect, it might have been wiser to bring Feisal into Damascus sooner, but there was also something to be said for Lawrence’s idea of keeping him away while the local politicians and the tribesmen fought it out. Feisal’s object was to make his entrance only after Lawrence and those political figures Feisal trusted had (to paraphrase Isaiah 40) prepared the way. The Turks’ neglect of the city had to be put right; an effort had to be made to clean up garbage, round up and disarm the remaining Turkish soldiers, remove the signs of widespread looting and the corpses in the streets, and restore such vital public services as electricity, fire brigades, and hospitals. Above all, the activities of Abd el Kader and Mohammed Said, now amounting to a small-scale rebellion, had to be dealt with, since they were exhorting people to reject a government contaminated by its relationship with a Christian power—the British. The fact that Syria was going to be taken by the French was not yet widely known.

On October 2, Chauvel marched some of his troops into the city and placed a company of Australian light horsemen at the railway station and the town hall. Their presence was enough to restore a certain degree of order to the city, though it left Lawrence with the problem of finding forage for 40,000 horses. Still, the political situation remained obscure. Ali Riza Rejabi, a more energetic figure altogether, replaced Shukri as military governor, and promptly sided with Abd el Kader and his brother. Lawrence thought this was likely to give rise to trouble with both the British and the French.

That evening, as Lawrence heard the muezzins recite the call to evening prayer, he thought about the falseness of his position: “I had been born free, and a stranger to those whom I had led for two years, and tonight it seemed that I had given them all my gift, this false liberty drawn down to them by spells and wickedness, and nothing was left me but to go away.” His departure would be sooner than he may have expected. In the meantime, Abd el Kader and his brother Mohammed Said staged their rebellion at midnight, encouraging their followers and dissident Druses to arm themselves and “burst open shops.” At first light, Mohammed Said was arrested, but Abd el Kader fled into the countryside, to hide among his followers. Lawrence “itched to shoot him,” but decided to wait until both brothers were in custody.*

At lunchtime, an Australian army doctor complained to Lawrence of the appalling conditions in the Turkish military hospital. Lawrence thought he had covered all three hospitals in Damascus—the civil, the military, and the missionary—but the Turks had used their barracks as a hospital as well, and this had been overlooked. He rushed to the barracks—where the Australian guard at first refused to let him enter, thinking he was an Arab—then walked through the huge area “squalid with rags and rubbish.” He eventually found a room crammed with dead Turkish soldiers: “There might be thirty there, and they crept with rats who had gnawed red galleries into them…. Of some the flesh, just going putrid, was yellow and blue and black. Others were already swollen…. Of others the softer parts were fallen in, while the worst had burst open, and were liquescent with decay.” Beyond this room was a large ward, into which Lawrence had to advance over “a soft mass of bodies,” a worse place of horror, in which long lines of men lay in their beds, dying of disease, thirst, and hunger and crying out softly, Aman, aman(“Pity, pity”). Most of them had dysentery, and their few clothes and dressings were stiff with caked filth. Lawrence tried, but failed, to interest the Australians in helping, then went upstairs into the barracks and found the Turkish commandant and a few doctors “boiling coffee over a spirit stove.” He forced them, and a few of the less seriously sick of the Turkish soldiers, to dig a six-foot-deep trench in the garden, gather up the corpses, and dump them one by one into it. Some of the corpses could be lifted and carried on stretchers; others had to be scraped up off the floor with shovels. He finally left another British officer in charge of the work and went back to the Hotel Victoria at midnight, ill and exhausted. He had slept less than three hours before leaving Deraa four days ago. At the hotel, the first thing to greet him was a reprimand from General Chauvel because the Arabs had failed to salute Australian officers properly.

The next morning, October 3, he went back to the Turkish barracks and found that conditions were improving. The dead were buried; lime had been spread everywhere; the living were being washed, put into clean shirts, and given water—it was still a charnel house, but a measure of order and humanity was being restored. Just as Lawrence was leaving, a major of the Royal Army Medical Corps, an Englishman, strode up to him and “asked [him] shortly if he spoke English.” Lawrence said he did, and “with a glance of disgust at my skirts and sandals” the major asked whether Lawrence was in charge. Lawrence said that in a way he was, and the major began to shout at him indignantly and almost incoherently: “scandalous, disgraceful, outrageous, ought to be shot.” Taken aback by this onslaught, just as he was about to congratulate himself on having taken care of a hopeless situation, Lawrence involuntarily laughed, “cackled like a duck, with the wild laughter that often took me at moments of strain.” He was unable to stop laughing, and the major, wild with anger, slapped him hard across the face “and stalked off, leaving me more ashamed than angry, for in my heart I felt that he was right, and that anyone who had, like me, pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their master, must come out of it so stained that nothing in the world would make him clean again.”

In essence this was the feeling that would motivate Lawrence throughout the rest of his life: the belief not just that he had failed the Arabs by not getting them the state and the independence they had fought for, but that he was rendered, by what he had done, seen, and experienced, permanently unclean, unfit for the society of decent people, a kind of moral leper. It is important to realize that while Lawrence’s behavior after the war seemed strange to many people, it is not at all unfamiliar to those who have fought in a war.

Lawrence was always able to function; indeed in many respects his greatest achievements were still ahead of him—but in some way he took on the guilt and the shame of everything he, and millions of others, had done. His wild, manic laughter in Damascus took place, perhaps appropriately, on the day he would leave behind the role of “Colonel Lawrence,” which he had come to despise, and begin, with halting steps, a new life, under a variety of new names.

Early the same morning, Allenby arrived in Damascus at last, and stopped briefly at the Victoria Hotel with his staff. Feisal was due to arrive the same day by train, and at first there was some doubt about whether he and Allenby, who was anxious to push on and take Aleppo and Beirut, could meet. Feisal was planning a “triumphal entry” into Damascus, and the streets were already packed with people anticipating his arrival. Allenby was not interested in ceremonies, and ordered Major Young to find Feisal and tell him “to come and see me at once.” Young went off to intercept Feisal in General Liman von Sanders’s huge red Mercedes Roi des Belgeslimousine, which had been captured in Nazareth. By the time Young found him, Feisal had already left the train and mounted his horse, ready to ride into the city at the head of the mounted Arab regulars. When Young told Feisal that Allenby had only a few minutes and wished to see him, he rode off at the canter at once, so Young was obliged to trail after him in the big car. We have no way of knowing what Feisal thought at having his plans disrupted, but whatever his feelings were, Feisal must have realized that meeting Allenby was more important. Young took him up to Allenby’s suite; Allenby and Lawrence were on the balcony awaiting Feisal’s arrival, and when Allenby walked back into the room he and Feisal met for the first time.

Allenby’s mood was far from cheerful; he had hoped to avoid the meeting until he received definite instructions from London about the political arrangements for Syria, and after the polite greetings, it was his unwelcome task to give Feisal the bad news that the Sykes-Picot agreement was by no means dead. Using Lawrence as his interpreter—though it appears likely that Feisal understood a good deal more English and a lot more French than he thought it politic to admit—Allenby plunged right in with the bad news: France “was to be the Protecting Power over Syria"; Feisal was to have “the Administration of Syria” on behalf of his father, but under French “guidance,” and was not “to have anything to do” with Lebanon, which was reserved to France; and perhaps most unwelcome of all, Feisal was to exchange Lawrence as his liaison officer for “a French Liaison Officer at once.”

Feisal objected “very strongly.” He said that he preferred British to French assistance; that if Lebanon was not joined to Syria, “a country without a port was no good to him"; and that he “declined to have a French Liaison Officer or to recognize French guidance in any way.”

Allenby then “turned to Lawrence and said: ‘But did you not tell him that the French were to have the Protectorate over Syria?’ Lawrence said: ‘No Sir, I know nothing about it.’ [Allenby] then said: ‘But you knew definitely that he, Feisal, was to have nothing to do with the Lebanon?’ Lawrence said: ‘No Sir, I did not.’ ”

After this embarrassing exchange, Allenby laid down the law. Feisal, he pointed out, was a lieutenant-general under his command, and would have to obey his orders. After some further discussion, Feisal took his leave. It is possible that he and Lawrence may not have known of some of the more humiliating details of the French “protectorate,” but Lawrence certainly knew all about the Sykes-Picot agreement and had passed on what he knew to Feisal. Indeed Feisal could have read the agreement for himself, once the Bolsheviks had published the document. Feisal understandably found it more diplomatic to deny any knowledge of a document which he had supposed was a “dead letter,” and whose legitimacy he was bound to oppose. Given his admiration for Allenby, Lawrence must have found it difficult to say with a straight face that he knew nothing of the terms, which differed so dramatically from promises made to the Arabs.

That perhaps explains the bluntness of his dismissal. After Feisal’s departure, Lawrence told Allenby that “he would not work with a French Liaison Officer and that since he was due for leave and thought he had better take it now and go off to England. [Allenby] said, ‘Yes! I think you had!’ and Lawrence left the room.”

The next evening, Lawrence left Damascus, driven, for the last time, in the Blue Mist. His ambitions for the Arabs would have to be fought out in London and Paris now.

By October 24, he was home in Oxford, for the first time since 1914.

*The Army Service Corps (ASC) dealt with transport, supply, and vehicles; it became the royal Army Service Corps (rASC) in 1918.

*Lawrence spells it Tafileh; Liddell Hart spells it Tafila.

*About 35,000 today.

*“one attacks, then waits to see what happens.”

*Lawrence measured the distance at 3,100 yards by counting his paces; some of his critics have objected that the sights of a British Vickers machine gun were calibrated only up to 2,000 yards, but this ignores the fact that the Vickers was “effective” up to 4,500 yards, and like the British SMLE rifle of World War I, was designed to provide “long range volley firing” (also known as “indirect” or “plunging” fire) when needed. That is, the Vickers could be aimed and fired high in the air, so that the rounds would cover a great distance in an arc or parabola and plunge down on the enemy from directly above. Lawrence’s text makes it clear that this was what he had in mind, and did.

*Scipio’s decisive victory over Hasdrubal’s Carthaginians in Spain.

*Thirty thousand gold sovereigns would be worth about $9.6 million today.

*By the time the Kaiserschlact, as Field Marshal Hindenberg and General Ludendorff had named their offensive (thus shrewdly saddling the kaiser with the responsibility for it), ground to an end in June, it had cost the Germans nearly 700,000 casualties, and the British and French almost 500,000 each.

* Jeremy Wilson points out that Lawrence changed their names in Seven Pillars of Wisdom—they were actually Othman (Farraj) and Ali (Daud).

*From 1922, when Shaw first met him, Lawrence floats eerily into and out of Shaw’s plays: not only as Saint Joan, but elsewhere: as Private Meek in Too True to Be Good,and even as Adolphus Cusins, Barbara’s fiance in Major Barbara. Cusins is a slight,unassuming Greek scholar who in the end decides to become an armaments king, and hisdescription again might also serve for Lawrence: he is afflicted with a frivolous sense of humor … a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person who by mere force of character presents himself as and indeed actually is considerate,gentle, explanatory … capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness.(New York: random house, 1952, 228.)

*Even in the United Kingdom there was doubt. Asquith, the prime minister, noted in his diary on March 13, 1915, that “the only other partisan of this proposal [the Balfour Declaration] is Lloyd George who, i need not say, does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future.” (earl of oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections,1928.)

*There are conflicting accounts of Lawrence’s camel borne field library, but Liddell hart, who got the information from Lawrence himself, reports that he carried with him Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the comedies of Aristophanes

* This is the same place as Abu el Lissal. Transliterations of Arabic place names into English were, and remain, idiosyncratic.

* A tender was an open car converted into the equivalent of what Americans call a pickup truck.

*his position was not unique. Captain J. r. Shakespear played much the same role toward ibn Saud on behalf of the government of india. When Shakespear was killed in a desert skirmish, he was replaced by St. John Philby, the noted Arabist, ornithologist,and convert to islam, and father of the master spy and traitor Kim Philby.

* Wavell meant, in modern terms, 12,000 cavalrymen, 57,000 infantrymen, and an artillery strength of 540 guns.

*These were the standard “bangers” of the British army. Lawrence occasionally ate meat, when it was a question of being polite to his Arab hosts, or when there was nothing else to eat but camel meat. on at least one occasion he expressed pleasure at a piece of gazelle roasted over an open fire. his vegetarian bent was not dogmatic

*The famous term describing non upper class usage that is, lower middle class and middle class usage that Nancy Mitford enshrined in the english language when she wrote “The english Aristocracy” for Encounter in 1954. Whatever else he was, Lawrence was an oxonian who spoke impeccable upper class english. The word “powwow”from a fellow officer would grate on his nerves as much as “serviette” for “napkin.”

*in his memoir, The Fire of Life, General Barrow asserts he had no such conversation with Lawrence, and that since indian cavalry regiments on the Northwest Frontier always had a certain number of riding camels attached to them, he was as familiar with camels as Lawrence was. on the otherhand, Barrow may not have realized only a fewhours after the scene between them at Deraa that Lawrence was pulling hisleg.

* To put this in perspective, the number of the brothers’ Algerian followers in and around Damascus may have been as high as 12,000 to 15,000 people (David Fromkin,A Peace to End All Peace, New York: holt, 1989, 336).

*Abd el Kader would eventually be shot by sharifian police outside his home in Damascus on September 3, 1919 a classic instance of the clich “shot while attempting to escape.” Mohammed Said lived on to become a supporter of French rule in Syria.

CHAPTER NINE

In the Great World

… that younger successor of Mohammed, Colonel Lawrence, the twenty-eight-year-old conqueror of Damascus, with his boyish face and almost constant smile—the most winning figure … of the whole Peace Conference. —James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference Despite General Allenby’s abruptness, he and Lawrence had not lost their esteem for each other. Allenby may well have felt that Lawrence’s departure from Syria would make it easier for Feisal to get used to the inevitable, in the form of a French replacement, but if so he was wrong. Throughout the coming peace talks in Paris Lawrence would remain—to the fury of the French, and the occasional exasperation of the British Foreign Office—Feisal’s confidant, constant companion, interpreter, and adviser, the only European with whom Feisal could let his guard down. In Cairo, Lawrence gave Lady Allenby one of his most treasured mementos, the prayer rug from his first attack on a Turkish train. Allenby not only wrote to Clive Wigram,* assistant private secretary to King George V, asking him“to arrange for an audience with the King” for Lawrence, but at Lawrence’s request made him “a temporary, special and acting full colonel,” a rank that entitled Lawrence to take the fast train from Taranto to Paris instead of a slower troop train, and to have a sleeping berth on the journey. Allenby also wrote to the Foreign Office to say that Lawrence was on his way to London to present Feisal’s point of view on the subject of Syria.

Lawrence’s return therefore had a semiofficial gloss—far from coming home to shed his rank and be “demobilized,” in the military jargon of the day, Lawrence arrived with the crown and two stars of a colonel on his shoulders and a string of interviews arranged at the very highest level of government. Although Lawrence claimed to have felt like “a man dropping a heavy load,” there seems to have been no doubt in his mind, or Allenby’s, that he was returning to Britain to take up the Arab cause.

Lawrence was exhausted, thin almost to emaciation, weighing no more than eighty pounds, as opposed to his usual 112. This is borne out both by Lawrence’s older brother Bob, who was shocked by his appearance when he arrived home, and by James McBey’s startling portrait of him, painted in Damascus, in which his face is as thin and sharp as a dagger, and his eyes are enormous and profoundly sad. It is the face of a man worn out by danger, stress, responsibility, and disappointment. The faintly ironic smile on his lips seems to suggest that he already suspects nothing he fought for is likely to happen. The confusion, chaos, jealousies, and violence in Damascus may already have convinced him that there was not going to be a noble ending to his adventures.

On the ship from Port Said to Taranto, Italy, Lawrence persuaded his fellow passenger and former fellow soldier, Lord Winterton, a member of Parliament, to write on his behalf requesting interviews with Lord Robert Cecil (the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs*) and A. J. Balfour (the foreign secretary). Lawrence also interrupted his journey in Rome for a talk with Georges-Picot about the French position in Syria. During the course of this discussion Picot made it very clear, if there had been any doubt in Lawrence’s mind, that France remained determined to have Lebanon and Syria, and rule them from Paris in much the same way as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There was a place for Prince Feisal as the head of a government approved by France, and under the tutelage of a French governor-general and a French military commander, but he should have no illusions about creating an independent sovereign state.

Tragedy: Lawrence, exhausted, emaciated, and shorn of illusions. Damascus, 1918.

There occurred on this journey an incident that puzzled Lawrence’s biographers while he was still alive and provided material for them long after his death. Either at Taranto, between the ship and the train, or at Marseille, where the train presumably stopped before going on to Paris, Lawrence saw a British major dressing down a private for failing to salute, and humiliating the private by making him salute over and over again. Lawrence intervened, and when the major asked him what business it was of his, he removed his uniform mackintosh, which had no epaulets and hence no badges of rank; revealed the crown and two stars of a full colonel on his shoulders; pointed out that the major had failed to salute him; and made the major do so several times. Lowell Thomas’s version of this incident differs radically from Liddell Hart’s: according to Thomas, Lawrence asks the railway transport officer (RTO) at the Marseille station, a lieutenant-colonel (“a huge fellow, with a fierce moustache”), what time his train leaves, is snubbed, and then takes off his raincoat to show that he outranks the pompous RTO. In Robert Graves’s biography, Lawrence sees “a major … bullying two privates … for not saluting him,” and neglects to return their salute until Lawrence appears and makes him do so. Whichever one of these stories is true, they all illustrate the same point, which is Lawrence’s dislike of conventional discipline and of officers’ abusing their power over “other ranks.”

One point that the indefatigable Jeremy Wilson has clearly demonstrated in his exhaustive authorized biography is that there is always a germ of truth in every story Lawrence told about himself, though over the years Lawrence sometimes improved and embellished such stories. Taranto seems much more likely as the place where this occurred, first of all because there were more British troops at Taranto, but also because it had been only a matter of days then since General Chauvel’s inopportune complaint in Damascus about the Arabs’ failing to salute British officers, so the subject of saluting may still have been very much on Lawrence’s mind. This was also the first time in more than two years that Lawrence was dressed in a British uniform and found himself among British officers and men. In the desert, he had neither saluted nor encouraged British personnel below his rank to salute him. Now he was back in the army. He was returning to a world where rank mattered and class distinctions were absolute, a world very different from the rough simplicity of desert warfare.

He arrived home “on or about October 24th,” but spent only a few days with his family in Oxford before getting down to the business of securing Syria for Feisal and the Arabs. Only four days later, thanks to Winterton’s letter of introduction, he had a long interview with Lord Robert Cecil, perhaps the most eminent, respectable, and idealistic figure in Lloyd George’s government. Cecil was a son of the marquess of Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister who had dominated late Victorian politics; the Cecil family traced its tradition of public service back to 1571, when Queen Elizabeth I made William Cecil her lord treasurer. Robert Cecil was an Old Etonian, an Oxonian, a distinguished and successful lawyer, an architect of the League of Nations, and a firm believer in Esperanto as a universal common language. He would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, among many other honors. The fact that he was willing to see Lawrence on such short notice is a tribute not only to Lord Winterton’s reputation, but to Lawrence’s growing fame as a hero. Of course he was not yet the celebrity he would become when Lowell Thomas had established him in the public mind as “Lawrence of Arabia,” but his service in the desert was already sufficiently well known to open doors that would surely have remained closed to anyone else. Cecil’s notes on the meeting—in which he shrewdly comments that Lawrence always refers to Feisal and the Arabs as “we"—make it clear that Lawrence’s ideas on the future of the Middle East were both intelligent and far-reaching, and were viewed with sympathy by one of the most influential figures in what would later come to be called “the establishment.” The next day, Lawrence had an equally long and persuasive discussion with Lieutenant-General Sir George Macdonogh, GBE, KCB, KCMG, adjutant-general of the British army, and creator of MI7, an intelligence unit intended to sabotage German morale. Macdonogh, who was very well informed about the Middle East, afterward circulated to the war cabinet a long and admiring report on his discussion with Lawrence, the gist of which was that the Sykes-Picot agreement should be dropped, Syria should be “under the control” of Feisal, Feisal’s half brother Zeid should rule northern Mesopotamia, and Feisal’s brother Abdulla should rule southern Mesopotamia—in short, Lawrence converted Macdonogh.

Perhaps as a result of the “Macdonogh memorandum,” Lawrence was invited to address the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet on October 29, only five days after he had arrived back in Britain. Deducting two days for the time he had spent with his family in Oxford, Lawrence had reached the highest level of the British government in seventy-two hours. Judging from Macdonogh’s memorandum, he did so first by the lucidity and intelligence of his ideas, and second because what he had to say was viewed with intense sympathy. The British government believed, like Lawrence, that the Sykes-Picot agreement should be discarded; that Arabs and Zionists should cooperate in Palestine under the protection of a British administration; that Mesopotamia should be an Arab “protectorate,” ruled from Cairo, not from Delhi; and that Arab ambitions (and British promises) in Syria should be respected. If Lawrence was not quite preaching to the converted, he was at any rate preaching to those who were prepared to convert. On the other hand, since there were still few signs that the war was about to end suddenly—in twenty-three days, in fact—the general feeling was that there was still plenty of time to bring the French around to this point of view. The British also believed that Woodrow Wilson would certainly denounce the Sykes-Picot agreement as a perfect example of secret diplomacy, which he wanted to end once and for all. Lawrence, who had after all stopped in Rome to talk directly to Picot, had a good idea of just how intransigent the French were likely to be; but perhaps sensibly, he does not seem to have raised this with either Cecil or Macdonogh.

In any event, Lawrence’s appearance at the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet is almost as much of a puzzle for biographers as the story about the saluting incident at Taranto or Marseille. He himself once said that he “was more a legion than a man,” a reference to the man from Gadara whose name was “Legion” because he was possessed by so many demons. Lawrence found no difficulty in presenting different versions of himself to people throughout his lifetime, hence the often wildly conflicting reactions to him.

The meeting was chaired by the Rt. Hon. the Earl Curzon, KG, GSCI, GCIE, PC, former viceroy of India, leader of the House of Lords, one of the most widely traveled men ever to sit in a British cabinet, and perhaps one of the most formidable and hardworking political figures of his time. A graduate of Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he was in some respects everything that Lawrence was not: his career at Oxford had been glittering, both academically and socially; he was renowned for his arrogance and inflexibility (caused in part by the fact that a riding injury in his youth obliged him to wear a steel corset that inflicted on him unceasing, lifelong pain, and made his posture seem unnaturally stiff and straight). His attitude toward life was grandly aristocratic, so that he sometimes seemed more appropriate to the eighteenth than to the twentieth century.

As Lawrence later told the story, he sat before the committee while Curzon made a long speech, outlining and praising Lawrence’s feats—a speech that for some reason Lawrence “chafed at.” Lawrence may, as he later complained, have found this speech patronizing, particularly since he knew most of the members of the committee, but it is more likely that Curzon’s grandiloquent manner simply rubbed him the wrong way. In any case, once Curzon finished, he asked if Lawrence wished to say anything, and Lawrence answered: “Yes, let’s get to business. You people don’t understand yet the hole you have put us all into.”

Lawrence, writing to Robert Graves in 1927, added: “Curzon burst promptly into tears, great drops running down his cheeks, to an accompaniment of slow sobs. It was horribly like a mediaeval miracle, a lachryma Christi, happening to a Buddha. Lord Robert Cecil, hardened to such scenes, presumably, interposed roughly, ‘Now old man, none of that.’ Curzon dried up instanter.” Lawrence then warned Graves, “I doubt if I’d publish it, if you do, don’t put it on my authority. Say a late member of the F.O. [Foreign Office] Staff told you.”

There are many questions about this account, some of which are obvious. First, why would Curzon ask if there was anything Lawrence wished to say, since Lawrence’s whole reason for being there was to speak to the committee? Second, it is hard to imagine Lord Robert Cecil, the most gentlemanly of men, speaking to anyone “roughly.” The spectacle of Curzon sobbing at a meeting of a committee of the war cabinet would certainly have startled the other members, and in fact, after Graves’s biography of Lawrence was published, Cecil wrote to Curzon’s daughter, Lady Cynthia Mosley,* denying that the incident had ever happened: “I feel quite certain that your father never burst into tears, and I am even more certain that I have never addressed him in the way described under any circumstances.” As for Curzon’s speech about Lawrence, Cecil wrote: “Colonel Lawrence listened with the most marked attention, and spoke to me afterwards in the highest appreciation of your father’s attitude.”

Of course Cecil may have felt it was his obligation to be polite to Lady Cynthia about her father, but nobody else who was present at the meeting seems to have commented on the incident, and this fact raises a certain amount of doubt about Lawrence’s story. Indeed, given how influential Curzon was, and the importance of Lawrence’s meeting with the committee, why on earth would Lawrence have gone out of his way to attack him?

Against this must be set the rumor that Curzon burst into tears in 1923 when Lord Stamfordham, the king’s private secretary, informed him that George V had decided to choose Stanley Baldwin instead of Curzon as prime minister, after Bonar Law announced his retirement. If Curzon could burst into tears on that occasion, then he could presumably have burst into tears in front of Lawrence and the members of the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet; but even so there is a certain gloating quality in Lawrence’s letter to Graves, which makes one uncomfortable. In addition, Lawrence’s suggestion that Graves should attribute the story to “a late member of the F.O. Staff” when he himself is the source of it seems rather devious for a man who set such high standards for himself.

In Scottish courts there used to be a verdict falling between “guilty” and “not guilty,” namely “not proven.” Lawrence’s story about Curzon bursting into tears seems to fit into that category perfectly.

The day after Lawrence’s appearance before the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet, he was involved in an even more controversial meeting at a much higher level. Allenby’s letter to Clive Wigram had produced a private audience with the king, who was in any case, given his interest in military affairs, curious to meet young Colonel Lawrence. Allenby had also recommended Lawrence for the immediate award of a knighthood, a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath (KCB), which was one step up in the senior of the two orders that Lawrence had already been awarded. Lawrence had already made it clear to the king’s military secretary that he did not wish to accept this honor, and that he merely wished to inform the king about the importance of Britain’s living up to the promises made to King Hussein, but whether this information was passed on accurately is uncertain. It seems unlikely that two men as realistic as General Allenby and Lord Stamfordham would have hidden from the king Lawrence’s unwillingness to receive any form of decoration—perhaps the most important part of Stamfordham’s job as a courtier was to ensure that the king was spared any kind of surprise or embarrassment, and Allenby was an ambitious man who would not have wished to offend his sovereign.

Once Lawrence arrived at Buckingham Palace, he learned that the king intended to hold a private investiture, and present him with the insignia of his CB and his DSO. It seems very likely that this was the king’s own idea, that he intended it as a thoughtful gesture toward a hero. Once he made up his mind to do it, neither Stamfordham nor the military secretary attempted to confront him over the matter—George V’s stubbornness and sharp temper were well known, and when he had made up his mind to do something he was not easy to divert. Thus Lawrence was ushered in to see the king and left to explain himself that he would not accept any decorations or honors, either old or new.