Lawrence disembarked at Basra, where he ran into several old friends from his Carchemish days, including Gertrude Bell and Campbell-Thompson – who were both serving in the Basra Intelligence Department under Sir Percy Cox – and Hubert Young, the Arabic-speaking officer who had helped him mould gargoyles for the roof of the Expedition House in 1913. Young, who had liked Lawrence on their first meeting, was on this occasion utterly disappointed in him: ‘He seemed to me thoroughly spoilt,’ Young wrote, ‘and posing in a way that was quite unlike what I remembered… It was then that I first noticed his anti-regular soldier complex and … resented it hotly.’³² If Young’s resentment is understandable, so is Lawrence’s: on the Western Front, at Gallipoli and now in Mesopotamia, regular soldiers had already squandered thousands of innocent lives – those of his brothers among them. Lawrence began to scour Basra for Arab contacts. He had been hoping to meet Sayid Taleb of the Pan-Arab party, but found he was out of the country. On 7 April he met Sulayman Fayzi, a Basra notable and former associate of Sayid Taleb, who had been a member of the Ottoman Parliament. Fayzi recalled that Lawrence had begun by saying that he liked the Arabs and wished them success. Britain was intent on giving them independence, he continued, but could do so only if the Arabs revolted against the Turks. ‘The British have authorised me to initiate this revolt,’ Lawrence told him, ‘and to offer what it may need in money and arms… I have selected you to perform the task of sparking the fire of the revolt.’³³ Fayzi replied that he could not raise a revolt since he was not a tribal chief. ‘With money you could do wonders,’ Lawrence told him. ‘You could pitch a great many tents, employ many guards and attendants, offer hospitality to all who visit you and grant valuable gifts to supporters. With all this you could become a great leader and would soon find yourself at the head of a great army.’³⁴ Fayzi said that he would consult with his friends – remnants of the Pan-Arab party’s committee – but came back later saying that they had rejected the proposal. Lawrence had been hoping to take some of them with him to the front before revealing the full details of his plan, but in the event he was forced to go off alone.

He left Basra on a paddle-steamer with an infantry detachment on 9 April and steamed up the Tigris, a viscous brown stream, stitched in a baroque pattern of switch-back channels and sandbreaks across a brooding, dead world of black and grey flint. On the first night the ship moored at Qurna – the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the putative site of the Garden of Eden. Staring into the brown waters as they swirled and mingled, Lawrence thought with nostalgia of his friends at Carchemish, and wondered if he would ever see Dahoum again. Although he did not know it then, Dahoum was almost certainly dead – killed by the terrible famine and epidemics of 1916 which the war had exacerbated. Carchemish had been his own private Garden of Eden: ‘till the war swallowed up everything,’ he wrote later, ‘I wanted nothing better than Carchemish, which was a perfect life.’³⁵ It might have been a requiem for an entire generation, for the holocaust in which he and his peers found themselves was a nodal point in world history – the point beyond which the traditions and assumptions which had governed European life for centuries would ultimately be swept away.

He arrived at Wadi – where Tigris Force had made its H Q – six days later, to be given short shrift from the senior members of staff. The relief campaign was faring badly, yet the generals intended to send in still more waves of troops. That his countrymen were being sacrificed like beasts on the altar of their leaders’ ambition distressed Lawrence as abjectly as it was to distress the war’s most celebrated poet, Wilfred Owen:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.³⁶

The Anglo-Indian generals did not wish to consider Lawrence’s ideas. Such unorthodox strategy, they said, was incompatible with the ideal of ‘military honour’ – that same ‘honour’ which had already cost thousands of lives without gaining them a single inch of ground. For them, any kind of secret or subversive activity in war was tantamount to ‘cheating’. It was precisely the same emotion which in earlier times had caused British officers to order their redcoats to fight in the open, since it was ‘cowardly’ to hide behind trees. But it was not only a matter of this misplaced conception of honour. The Anglo-Indian mandarins were horrified at the idea of an Arab Revolt. They felt that it would provide a dangerous example to India’s millions of Muslim subjects, the possibility of whose insurrection gave them sleepless nights. The generals would have their frontal offensive. Lawrence was struck down by fever at the critical moment, and could do little but thrash helplessly on his bunk.

At first light on 22 April, he was woken up by a shocking barrage of shellfire from the British guns. For forty minutes the cannon boomed with slow, deliberate percussion, then suddenly the rhythm increased to a crescendo – the prelude to an attack. The Turks were holding five lines of trenches at a place called Sannaiyat, in a narrow bottle-neck between a treacherous salt-marsh and the riverbank. It was an almost impregnable position, but in order to reach Kut, Tigris Corps had no alternative but to punch a way through. At point of the spearhead – 19th Brigade – were the Highlanders: the bloodied remnants of the 2nd Black Watch and the 1st Seaforths, so decimated from previous assaults that they had been hastily cobbled together into a single battalion for this fight. At 7 a.m. precisely, 19th Brigade moved out. Turkish machine-guns and artillery blazed at them from positions concealed by the dappling heat-haze, and the Highlanders rushed straight into the rattling maw of the guns. It had been estimated that it would take them seven minutes to broach the Turkish line. It took them four. As the men came into the range of their own artillery they waved their red markers frantically for the bombardment to stop. Then they drove themselves on through the waterlogged ditches, only to find their rifles so clogged with mud that they could not be fired. Moments later, the Turks swept in from the flanks with a massive counter-attack, and 19th Brigade was swamped. The position looked hopeless. One by one the spearhead battalions withdrew, leaving only the Highlanders – who ignored the order to retreat. Incredibly, they tried to continue the advance, making three separate assaults on the third line defences. From these three attacks, not a single man returned.

By 8.20 a.m. it was all over. The assault had lasted one hour and twenty minutes, and in that time 19th Brigade had lost over 1,000 men. They had advanced and retreated a little more than half a mile. The Highland Battalion had suffered more than 600 casualties – the 2nd Black Watch, the 1st Seaforth Highlanders, and the 6th Jaht Rifles together now consisted of fewer than 160 men. General Young-husband, commanding the Division, knew that the relief mission to Kut had failed. He could not ask them to advance again. ‘I cannot speak too highly of the splendid gallantry of the Highlanders, aided by a party of the Jahts, in storming the Turkish trenches,’ he wrote. ‘They showed qualities of endurance and courage under circumstances so adverse, as to be almost phenomenal.’³⁷

Once again, their valour had been wasted. A week later, white flags fluttered over Kut, and the 13,000 surviving troops of the 6th Indian Division were marched off into a captivity in which more than half of them died. General Townshend, the principal architect of the disaster, abandoned his division and spent an ‘honourable’ captivity in a hotel on the Bosphorus accompanied by his beloved dogs – the only animals which had not been eaten by the starving garrison. Sir Charles had great affection for his dogs, but as to his men, he never once inquired about their welfare. The Turks not only laughed at the British plan to bribe them, but also made political capital from it. Lawrence and Herbert met the Turkish generals for a parley on 29 April, but found that nothing could be salvaged from their plans but the exchange of a few wounded prisoners. The tragedy of Kut had cost the British 38,000 casualties in all, yet not an iota of political advantage had been gained. The British Empire had scarcely been at such a low. There had been slaughter on the Western Front, defeat at Gallipoli, Turkish attacks on the Suez Canal, and now, the dйbвcle at Kut. Lawrence returned to Basra disillusioned, deeply disappointed by his failure to have his strategy adopted, and disgusted with the attitude of the Anglo-Indian generals, still convinced that an Arab movement could have saved the day. All his hopes had been dashed: ‘I did nothing,’ he wrote, ‘of what was in my mind and power to do.’³⁸ On the ship back to Cairo he drafted a report criticizing them so scathingly that it had to be bowdlerized before being presented to Sir Archibald Murray, who had just replaced Sir John Maxwell as Commander-in-Chief.