On the Western Front there was stalemate, and in May Lawrence received the distressing news that Frank had been killed by shellfire while leading his platoon. He wrote soothing letters to his parents, and to his brother Will maintained the appropriate ‘stiff upper lip’: ‘Frank’s death was as you say a shock, because it was so unexpected,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t think one can regret it overmuch, because it was a very good way to take after all. The hugeness of this war has made one change one’s perspective, I think, for one can hardly see details at all.’¹⁸ He told his mother to keep a brave face to the world: ‘…we cannot all go fighting,’ he wrote, ‘but we can do that, which is in the same kind.’¹⁹ Secretly, though, his conscience was pricked. Not for the first time, perhaps, he asked himself if it was right to go on enjoying a comfortable desk job, far from the fighting, when his peers were risking their lives at the front. Newcombe and Woolley had already served on the Western Front, and now Lloyd and Herbert were at Gallipoli. He valued his contribution to the war effort, and knew that his specialized knowledge would be wasted if he became mere ‘cannon fodder’, but he also knew at a deeper level that it was his lifelong terror of being hurt which was really keeping him from the front. Lawrence was far from being a hero by nature, and though his self-imposed ordeals had given him a certain nodding acquaintance with physical suffering, he still feared it more than anything. His life had been spent in escaping from conformity rather than in seeking action, and he found danger almost physically crippling: ‘one reason that taught me I wasn’t a man of action,’ he wrote later, ‘was [the] routine melting of bowels before a crisis.’²⁰ After the war, his brother Arnie would write that he was not a ‘natural hero or naturally brave …and knowing this… he put himself through severe tests and overcame his natural weaknesses’.²¹ George Lloyd thought him ‘not in the least fearless like some who do brave things’.²² In the summer of 1915, there seemed little to justify his existence. His plans for the Alexandretta landing and for the al-Idrisi revolt had fallen though: ‘Arabian affairs have gone all to pot,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve never seen a more despicable mess made of a show. It makes one howl with fury – for we had a ripping chance there.’²³ All efforts were bent towards success at Gallipoli, in which he could play little part, and he kept himself busy in writing geographical digests and reports for the High Command, tracking the movements of Turkish forces, and periodically interviewing Syrian prisoners of war. Though he prided himself on being able to pinpoint the districts they came from merely by their dialects, hard intelligence on Syria and Palestine remained poor. He rumbled periodically on a borrowed motorbike between the Savoy and Bulaq, where the Survey offices were situated. He wandered disconsolately in the bazaar, buying the occasional carpet for his family and the odd Hittite seal for Hogarth, who was still struggling to find a war job. He had dinner with Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who had lent him money at Petra. He enciphered and deciphered telegrams, supervised the printing, packing and dispatch of maps, and made more abortive and inappropriate plans for attacks on Syria. He read The Greek Anthology, Hйrйdia and William Morris. Woolley was sent to provide liaison with the French navy at Port Sa’id, and the Department was augmented by Philip Graves, a former correspondent of The Times: other personnel came and went like passing ghosts. Lawrence went on a brief excursion to improve liaison with the Intelligence office in Athens, but on his return he felt even more weighed down by what he called ‘official inertia’. He began to toy with the idea of going up to Gallipoli: he wondered, even, if life would be better in a trench. Cairo was hot, dusty and squalid, and Lawrence summed up his feelings when he told Hogarth: ‘Everything is going to sleep …’²⁴

Into this atmosphere of almost palpable lethargy, Sharif Hussain’s letter dropped like a bombshell. Storrs, who went over the missive line by line, was astonished to see that the Sharif was demanding virtually the whole of the Arab dominions of the Ottoman Empire in return for Arab help: he could hardly believe Hussain’s effrontery, and found himself murmuring as he read it:

In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch

Is offering too little and asking too much.²⁵

For all Kitchener’s flaunting of a Caliphate, Sharif Hussain was actually regarded by the British as a minor Arab chieftain, who represented no one but his own family, the Hashemites, and should, in their view, have been well pleased with independence and autonomy for the Hejaz. Storrs was highly amused by the message, whose pretensions, he felt, ‘bordered on the tragic-comic’ – he could only believe it was a preposterous opening gambit in a process of bargaining such as one might hear in the bazaar: ‘…it may be regarded as certain,’ he wrote, ‘that [the Sharif] has no sort of mandate from other potentates …and that he knows he is demanding, possibly as a basis for negotiation, far more than he has the right, the hope, or the power to expect.’²⁶ As a result, McMahon’s reply – composed by Storrs and dispatched on 30 August – was non-committal. He merely confirmed Kitchener’s original assurances, but refused to be drawn on the issue of frontiers, stating that it was a waste of time to discuss such things under the stress of war. Hussain answered almost immediately, expressing amazement at British hesitation: the negotiations, he wrote, depended solely and fundamentally on whether or not they accepted the proposed borders.

By the time this second note reached Cairo in September, however, the situation had changed. In that month a young Arab officer called Mohammad Sharif al-Faruqi had slipped through the Turkish lines at Gallipoli under the pretext of leading a burial party, and defected to the British. Sent to Cairo, he was interrogated by Lawrence among others, and what he had to say astonished them. Al-Faruqi was an Arab from Iraq, and claimed to be a descendant of the third ‘Right Minded’ Khalif of the Muslims, Omar, whose nickname had been al-Faruq – ‘The Divider’. He was, he said, a member of al-‘Ahd, the secret society of Arab officers in the Turkish army, which with its sister society, al-Fatat, had devised the Damascus Protocol on which Hussain’s demands were based. Although al-Faruqi was not the official spokesman for al-‘Ahd the British at first believed him to be, he revealed a great deal about the aims and organization of the nationalist secret societies in Syria that neither Lawrence nor his colleagues had been aware of. To the delight of Clayton and Lawrence, he confirmed that the Sharif did, indeed, speak for more than just the Hashemites.

Nevertheless, McMahon was unable to concede all that the Sharif asked, since the French, with whom his government were about to enter an agreement over the fate of Syria, already considered the western portion of the country to be rightfully theirs. In his next letter he agreed to Hussain’s proposals with certain exceptions, including the districts west of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus which he claimed – almost certainly with Lawrence’s prompting – were not ‘purely Arab’. These areas – the Syrian littoral and its hinterland, which formed parts of the Ottoman Sanjaq of Lebanon and Vilayet of Beirut – were claimed by Britain’s French allies and had been earmarked as regions of possible French interest in a report made by Lawrence himself earlier that year. Hussain replied that he could not accept that these districts were not wholly Arab, and once again the negotiations faltered over French demands. It was, Lawrence commented, not the Turks but the French who were the real enemy in Syria.