His eccentric appearance belied his incisive mind, however, and he vowed to end incompetence. Put in charge of all maps supplied to GHQ, by the Survey of Egypt, he determined to go through map-production like a dose of salts. The topography of many theatres of the war was little known, and place-names were spelled in a wild variety of different ways, many of them bearing little relation to the way they were pronounced by natives. Although Lawrence knew that there was no foolproof system of transliterating Arabic, and would later take great pride in spelling Arabic names ‘anyhow’, he recognized that a consistent scheme must be developed which bore some resemblance to the actual pronunciation. He lost no time in criticizing the Survey’s transliteration system to the Director of the Reproduction Office, W. H. Crosthwaite, who had himself invented it. He similarly affronted W. M. Logan, Director of the Map Compilation Office, who objected strongly to being bossed about by this impudent little upstart. Ernest Dowson, Director of the Survey, recalled, however, that ‘it was not only the pompous, the inefficient and the pretentious whose cooperation Lawrence’s ways tended to alienate. Many men of sense and ability were repelled by the impudence, freakishness and frivolity he trailed so provocatively.’⁴ Cairo was very far in spirit from Carchemish, where Lawrence had been one of only two Europeans in a vast area, a sort of unofficial consul, a local employer and a man of great consequence. He was suddenly aware, perhaps, that the game he was playing here was a much bigger one, and with his instinctive feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, he was seeking desperately to establish himself in a position. He stood aloof from the social whirl, and was definitely not one of those to be found decorating the bar-stools in the Continental: he was not teetotal, he said, but merely lacked the sociability to enjoy a cosy drink. He had always felt ill at ease with the Egyptians, but his few forays into the streets now convinced him that they actually hated their British overlords. ‘Cairo is unutterable things,’ he wrote after settling in. ‘I took a day off last month and went and looked at it: no more: – and to think that – this folly apart – one might have been living on that mound in the bend in the Euphrates, in a clean place, with decent people not far off. I wonder if one will ever settle down again and take an interest in proper things.’⁵

In February 1915 Lawrence’s racing bicycle arrived from England, and he would cycle to work every morning from the Continental to GHQ, in the Old Savoy Hotel, which stood in what is today Talaat Harb Square, on a site now occupied by a department store. The Intelligence Department to which he had been posted was directed by his friend Stewart Newcombe, and consisted to begin with of only three other officers: Leonard Woolley and two Unionist MPs recently drafted in, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert. Despite congenial stories which later emerged about ‘The Five Musketeers’, there were two factions in the office from the start, for Newcombe, Lawrence and Woolley knew each other well from the Negev survey, while Lloyd and Herbert were both Welshmen, both old Etonians, and had both served as Honorary Attachйs to the British Embassy in Constantinople. They were Oriental dabblers of the Hogarth stamp, speaking a dozen languages between them, and Herbert already had a reputation as an adventurer, having fought alongside the Turks in the Balkans and in Yemen. A younger son of the Earl of Carnarvon, he was later immortalized as John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle: ‘You will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Meccan pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy’s friends in it. In shepherd’s huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes.’⁶ Lawrence was both attracted and repelled by the self-assured, dilettantish aristocrat, and thought him ‘quaint’ and ‘a joke, but a very nice one’.⁷ Herbert reciprocated Lawrence’s half-admiring, half-deprecating attitude, calling him ‘gnomish’ and ‘half-cad’, but admitting that he had a touch of genius. Lloyd, who divided his time between his constituents, the East, and his work as director of a bank, was another upper-class Welshman whom Lawrence found ‘exceedingly noisy’ but valued for his knowledge of trade and politics, and his air of confidence. He remained in touch with Lloyd after he and Herbert left for Gallipoli and travelled with him later in the campaign. Both Lloyd and Herbert were uncomfortable with Newcombe, however, and objected to taking orders from this highly intelligent and able, but sadly ‘underbred’ Sapper. Lawrence’s view was different: ‘Newcombe is… a most heavenly person,’ he wrote. ‘He runs all the spies, & curses all the subordinates who don’t do their duty and takes the raw edges off generals and things. Without that I should have gone mad, I think.’⁸ Newcombe’s immediate superior was the йminence grise of Middle East intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert ‘Bertie’ Clayton, a veteran of the Egyptian army, who had fought the Dervishes at Omdurman beside Lord Kitchener. Clayton was the archetypal grey man: quiet and unassuming, he was, as Lawrence discovered, ‘far bigger …than [he] appeared at first sight’. Before the war he had served as Sudan Agent in Cairo, and Intelligence Director to the Sirdar or C-in-C of the Egyptian Army, Sir Reginald Wingate – who doubled as Governor-General of the Sudan. In 1914, he had been brought back into the army by General Sir John Maxwell, the General Officer Commanding British Forces in Egypt, who had given him carte blanche to run intelligence operations. Clayton’s position was all-powerful, and he took it upon himself not only to gather intelligence but also to nudge policy judiciously where he felt it was required. Even before war with Turkey had been declared, Clayton had received Storrs’s suggestion of raising an Arab Revolt with enthusiasm, and was an early supporter of the Hashemites. He had sent a letter to Kitchener early in 1914 urging an immediate approach to Hussain. Lawrence later confessed admiration for Clayton’s far-sightedness and detachment and particularly for the free hand he gave to his subordinates, yet his description of his influence, ‘like water or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything’, is not entirely flattering.⁹ Lawrence also got to know Storrs well, and the two men found each other convivial company. They shared literary tastes, and Storrs would often return to his flat to find Lawrence already there, curled up in an armchair reading Latin or Greek: ‘I found him from the beginning an arresting and intentionally provocative talker,’ Storrs recalled, ‘liking nonsense to be treated as nonsense and not casually or dully accepted or dismissed. He could flare into sudden anger at a story of pettiness, particularly official pettiness or injustice.’¹⁰ Lawrence later admitted that he thought Storrs the most brilliant Englishman in the Middle East, but commented that his influence would have been even greater had he been more single-minded. Storrs was sometimes irritated by Lawrence’s lack of social etiquette, recalling that he had once arranged a special dinner party of four guests for Lawrence, who had failed to turn up without offering any excuse: ‘He only told me long afterwards,’ Storrs wrote, ‘that I had more than “got back at him” by explaining that I shouldn’t have minded if he had warned me in time to get someone else.’¹¹

Lawrence referred to himself as ‘bottle washer and office boy pencil sharpener and pen wiper’ of the department, but in fact, though the most junior officer in rank, he shared fully in the work. The raison d’кtre for the British presence in Egypt was the defence of the Suez Canal, and opinion was divided as to how this should best be accomplished. There were those ‘Westerners’ who believed that the Western Front in Europe was the ‘real’ war, and an active campaign in any other theatre merely a ‘sideshow’. They lobbied for a purely defensive policy in Egypt, a policy which Lawrence, like the rest of the Intelligence Department, actively contested. They were ‘Easterners’, who believed that attack was the best means of defence and pushed for a British invasion of the Ottoman Empire, specifically a landing at Alexandretta on the coast of Syria. Lawrence, who was later to claim falsely that the Alexandretta scheme was his idea, was certainly one of its most passionate advocates. He believed that the moment the British landed in Syria, the Syrians would revolt against the Turks, and Arab elements in the Ottoman armies would mutiny, establishing an Arab government there before the French, who had designs in Syria, could prevent them. Lawrence had scented revolution in the air while at Carchemish in 1913, and well knew that the ordinary Syrians were not prepared to get rid of one foreign master merely to make way for another and even more alien one. Though the Alexandretta landing proposal was well received by the cabinet, it was vetoed by the French, who recognized as well as Lawrence the dangers it entailed for their colonial policy. Soon it was eclipsed by plans for a mass landing at Gallipoli, and Lawrence turned his attention to the Assir, the mountainous and fertile region of Arabia which lay immediately south of the Hejaz. The Porte held little sway in this remote corner of Arabia, and the Assir’s ruler, al-Idrisi, was a notorious opponent of the Turks. In February, the Anglo-Indian Government concluded a treaty with al-Idrisi, paying him a stipend of Ј7,000 per year, and for a while Lawrence nurtured high hopes that his followers would revolt against the Turks and carry the revolution north in the name of the Emir of Mecca: ‘I think Newcombe & myself are going down to [Qunfidhdha – in the Assir] as his advisers,’ he wrote. ‘If Idrisi is anything like as good as we hope we can rush right up to Damascus, & biff the French out of all hope of Syria. It’s a big game and at last one worth playing.’¹² Al-Idrisi proved a damp squib, however, and as for the Emir of Mecca himself, throughout the first part of 1915 he had maintained an ominous silence.