On 4 August, Lawrence guided the Camel Corps companies under Buxton to Rum, and, leaving them to attack Mudowwara without him, flew to Jefer to meet Nuri as-Sha’alan of the Rwalla. He was distinctly apprehensive about this meeting. During his secret northern ride from Nabk in 1917, he had assured the Emir that he could trust the most recent of British promises. Nuri now knew the full terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement, and Lawrence thought he might demand fulfilment of the ‘dishonourable half-bargain’ they had made on that long-ago day in Azraq. What this mysterious ‘half-bargain’ might have been, Lawrence never revealed, only that, on their meeting at Jefer, the Emir did not claim it, and the encounter ended with Nuri giving his whole-hearted support to the Hashemite cause. A few days later, Lawrence returned to Jefer by car with Joyce to meet the Camel Corps, who had successfully captured Mudowwara station and demolished the water-tower. Lawrence completed a reconnaissance mission to Azraq, while the Camel Corps went for the viaduct at Qissir. The mission was abandoned on 20 August when the column was spotted by German aircraft, and Buxton learned that a hostile Bedu tribe lay encamped between them and their target.

Meanwhile, a crisis was shaping up among the regular Arab officers at Aba 1-Lissan, who had read a newspaper report in which King Hussain denied that Ja’afar Pasha had ever been appointed Commander of the Northern Army. This was Hussain’s last attempt to assert control over his son Feisal, who had personally promoted Ja’afar Commander-in-Chief in 1917 without consulting his father. Hussain had always been suspicious of the Arab regular officers, fearing that they would ‘take over’ the Revolt, and it was for this reason he had dismissed Aziz al-Masri, Ja’far’s predecessor, who had, long before Lawrence, developed much of the strategy of the Arab campaign. Hussain knew that Feisal was a weak character, easily swayed by his advisers, and he was terrified that the Arab cause would be hijacked by the Allies’ territorial ambitions. Though Lawrence put Hussain’s reaction down to ‘jealousy’ and ‘lust for power’, the fact is that it suited the British and the French to divide the Hashemites, just as it had suited the Turks. Hussain believed that Feisal was opening the doors for French ambitions in Syria, and while Lawrence later claimed that the old man was ‘crazy’, the Emir was, of course, ultimately proved right.

On reading Hussain’s declaration that there was ‘no Arab officer higher in rank than captain’, Ja’afar Pasha resigned, and was promptly followed by all his staff. Feisal himself resigned in solidarity, which rendered the oaths made to him by the Bedu meaningless. With Feisal’s resignation, the chances of massing the great force of Rwalla Lawrence had counted on for a direct assault on Dara’a dissolved. In one fell swoop, the entire Revolt looked ready to collapse, and on 26 August, Lawrence rushed to Aba 1-Lissan to deal with the impasse. This was a vital moment in the Dara’a operation. That very day, the first of Young’s supply convoys had been about to leave Aqaba, when a cry of ‘Tayaara! Tayaara!’ had gone up, and two German aircraft had drummed out of the heat-haze over the Wadi Araba and delivered a package of bombs among the caravans. The animals had gone wild, breaking their lead ropes, bucking and scattering their loads across the plain. With silent curses yet infinite attention to detail, Young had rallied the handlers, picked up the baggage, re-packed the camels, re-strung the caravans, and set the train on its way again. At Aba 1-Lissan, though, the Arab officers would not shift ground without some conciliatory move from Hussain. On 30 August Lawrence telegraphed Clayton that the Hedgehog staff were assuming command of the operation, which would go ahead as planned. Lawrence knew that while they might take Dara’a without Feisal, to have marched into Damascus without him would have meant the defeat of everything they had worked for over the past two years. The Arabs would then be without bargaining power, and the Allies would establish a government in Syria. He told Clayton that he could hold things together for only four days – if no solution were found by then, he would have to evacuate the forward posts and abort the Dara’a mission on which the whole future of the Arabs depended. The days clicked by interminably and there was no word from Hussain. At last, on 4 September, a long message arrived from the King consisting of both a lame apology, and a reiteration of the same accusation in a different form. Lawrence brazenly lopped off the offending part of the message, marked it ‘most urgent’ and sent it to Feisal’s tent.

On 3 September, against all odds, an assault caravan of Arab regulars, together with the French-Algerian artillery battery under Captain Pisani on mules, and a supply column, set out for Azraq. Feisal drove out in his Vauxhall car to review them as the camels strutted out across the grassy downs of the Shirah: ‘As each section saluted Feisal,’ Young wrote, ‘I even felt an absurd lump in my bearded throat at the greatness of the sight.’⁸ On the 6th, Lawrence drove to Azraq in a Rolls-Royce tender with Sharif Nasir, who was to lead the Bedu in the final stroke, and Lord Winterton, who had just been transferred to Hedgehog from the disbanded Imperial Camel Corps. Over the next week the assault force began to assemble. On 10 September two aircraft of the recently renamed Royal Air Force landed. Joyce and Stirling – another recent recruit to the Arab mission – came in on 11 September with the armoured cars. Feisal arrived on the 12th with Marshall, the medical officer. Behind him came Nuri as-Said with the 450 Arab regulars, Pisani with his Algerian gunners, the baggage convoy of 1,500 camels with Young, a company of trained demolition-men from the Egyptian Camel Corps under Peake, a section of Gurkha camel-men under Scott-Higgins, and Bedu irregulars of the Rwalla under Nuri ash-Sha’alan, of the Howaytat under Auda and Mohammad adh-Dhaylan, the Bani Sakhr under Fahad, clans of the Seridyyeh and Serahiyyin, Druses, Syrian villagers under Talal al-Haraydhin, Lawrence’s small bodyguard of Hauran peasants and Nasir’s Agayl – a total of almost 1,000 men. As hardware, they had two Bristol aircraft, four quick-firing Napoleon mountain-guns, twenty-four machine-guns, and three armoured cars with their tenders. This was the blade which would carve the victory for which Lawrence had worked so long: the climax of his years of preaching revolt had come. Yet, when the strike force was complete, Lawrence felt despondent. First, he knew that the time of reckoning was near, when the British deception of the Hashemites – and his major role in this charade – would be revealed in all its iniquity. He had raised these ‘tides of men’, he felt, on a sham promise and brought them to worship an ideal of unity in which he could not believe himself. This conflict between the ideal and the prosaic reflected the inner struggle which had been part of Lawrence since childhood. The Arabs themselves were more practical: Auda Abu Tayyi had corresponded with the Turks when the situation had seemed favourable; the Bedu of the Hejaz had retired from the fighting line when it suited them: even Feisal had made overtures to the Turks. Nuri ash-Sha’alan had remained neutral until it seemed that the Hashemites were on the winning side, while many of the tribes, or sections of tribes, of the Hejaz and even of Syria had never joined the Hashemite cause at all. Certainly, Syrian nationalists like Nasib al-Bakri – upon whom Lawrence poured vitriol – were fighting for liberty, but the Hashemites were fighting largely for family patrimony. On their own, they had proved damp squibs: Zayd had lost the Wadi Safra, ‘Ali had almost lost Rabegh. Hussain had sacked his best man, Aziz al-Masri, and almost ruined the final operation by denying that Ja’afar Pasha was his Commander-in-Chief. Zayd had lied to him: Abdallah had rejected his advice. At Azraq he felt a sudden surge of loathing for ‘these petty incarnate Semites’, and for himself who had for two years pretended to be their friend, but had never really become one of them. The terrible fear of being hurt or killed which he had staved off for months, forcing himself to Herculean heights of bravado and self-sacrifice, was reasserting itself with a vengeance. He knew that his nerve was almost at an end, and within a few weeks he must either resign from his position or crack. The old oddness, his sense of inadequacy – absent when he rode with his bodyguard or consorted with Feisal – returned when he found himself among a large crowd. Worst of all, he had heard – perhaps from Syrian recruits – that Dahoum, his pre-war friend, was dead. The boy had been employed as a guard on the Carchemish site until 1916, when almost half the old workforce had perished in a terrible season of sickness and famine. Though Lawrence never mentioned Dahoum by name, he wrote afterwards that one of his main motives in leading the Arabs had been to make a present of freedom to a certain Arab whom he loved. He also wrote that this motive had ceased to exist ‘some weeks’ before the end of the campaign – referring not to the time of Dahoum’s probable death in 1916, but to the moment when he had actually heard of his friend’s demise. Later, composing his dedicatory poem ‘To SA’ while flying between Paris and Lyon in a Handley-Page, he wrote: ‘I wrought for him freedom to lighten his sad eyes: but he had died waiting for me. So I threw my gift away and now not anywhere will I find rest and peace.’⁹ In sorrow, anger and apprehension, Lawrence shunned the company at Azraq and walked off alone to ‘Ain al-Assad, where he had, perhaps, spent idle moments in November 1917 with ‘Ali ibn Hussain al-Harithi – another friend he might never see again.