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.