Lawrence rode with them the next day through Wadi Itm to Rumm. This was just as well, since several of the tribesmen took the opportunity of sniping at the British, even though they were allies. He was moved by riding in the company of British soldiers, a novel experience which filled him with “homesickness, making him feel an outcast.”

Once he had calmed the Howeitat at Rumm, who rumbled with discontent and anger at the presence of infidel soldiers, he rode back to Aqaba, then flew to Jefer to meet with that sinister old chieftain Nuri Shaalan and the Ruawalla sheikhs, whose goodwill he needed to reach Deraa. He settled their doubts with another rousing speech, this time “emphasizing the mystical enchantment of sacrifice for freedom,” then flew back to Guweira, and from there to Aqaba, racked by guilt at having once again persuaded men to risk their lives in the knowledge that they would probably only exchange living under Ottoman rule for life in a French colony.

The news that the 300 troopers of the Imperial Camel Brigade, under Major Buxton, had retaken Mudawara, together with 150 Turkish prisoners, for a loss of seven of their own killed and ten wounded, cheered him up, and he joined them at Jefer, where they were encamped, this time riding in his Rolls-Royce tender Blue Mist,* with an armored car as an escort. From there they moved north, Lawrence riding far ahead of Buxton’s troopers to “smooth the way” for them among the tribesmen, going all the way to Azrak, then returning to Beir to rejoin the troopers. Being among them again gave Lawrence “a mixed sense of ease and unease.” He felt at home among these big men from the rural shires of Britain, but at the same time was conscious of being, in their eyes, both a legendary hero and an oddity. He was afflicted with what Liddell Hart describes as not merely the usual self-doubt, but a growing “distaste for himself,” inevitable in one who accused himself of play-acting among his own admiring countrymen.

A few days later they reached Muaggar, only fifteen miles southeast of Amman, and within easy reach of the railway bridge and tunnel. Here they were discovered by a Turkish airplane. There were Turkish mule-mounted infantrymen near the bridge, and Lawrence, mindful of the fact that he and Dawnay had promised to avoid casualties among the Imperial Camel Brigade, seven of whose troopers had already been killed, decided to send them back to Azrak. They left enough evidence behind them of fires, “empty meat-tins,” and crisscrossing armored car tracks to make the Turks fear that Amman would be attacked.

Leaving his explosives buried at Azrak for future use, Lawrence raced back across the desert to Abu el Lissal to put out a blazing row between King Hussein in Mecca and the officers of the Arab army in the field. This particular tempest in a teacup had been caused by the fact that Jaafar had received a British decoration and had been referred to as “the general commanding the Arab Northern Army,” and King Hussein had thereupon announced in the official Mecca newspaper that no such rank existed. As a result of this insult, all the senior officers of the Arab army resigned, as did Feisal himself after receiving a “vitriolic” message from his father. The fact that most of these ranks were bogus in the first place did not reduce the tension between Abu el Lissal and Mecca. Feisal was styled a lieutenant-general and corps commander by the British, even though on a good day, counting regulars and Bedouin irregulars together, he seldom commanded more than the equivalent of a division; Jaafar Pasha was styled a major-general, although the number of his regulars seldom exceeded that of a brigade; and everyone else was ranked accordingly. It was an army with a disproportionate number of senior officers, and hardly any trained junior officers or NCOs. Lawrence, who had a certain respect for Hussein’s stubborn defense of his own prerogatives as a self-made king, and who was privy to both codes, adopted the novel technique of editing and altering Hussein’s messages to his son, simply eliminating any paragraphs that would offend Feisal, thus saving honor and, more important, avoiding the disintegration of Feisal’s army. Feisal very likely saw through this stratagem, but was wise enough not to question it. The episode also shows the degree to which Lawrence was involved in the politics and the differing ambitions of the sharifian family. For better or worse, he was not only Feisal’s military adviser, but his friend, political counselor, and confidant, the young Thomas а Becket to the young Henry II, with the addition of all the danger of being a foreigner and an unbeliever. Lawrence could play the role of courtier in an eastern court perfectly: as he himself put it, “I could flatter as well as flutter.” His position and his safety depended on Feisal’s trust. He never lost it, and he sacrificed what would have been, to anyone else, a comfortable and well-rewarded career, with every prospect of a knighthood or better, to secure thrones for Feisal and for Feisal’s older brother Abdulla.*

In the meantime, his objective was to get the Arab army and Feisal to Damascus before the British reached it. By the first week of September, “the desert had become a military highway, dotted with northern-moving columns that headed steadily for Azrak.” Lawrence, who rode past the long columns in his Rolls-Royce, had achieved a kind of double deception:the Turks believed that he was aiming for Amman, reinforced it accordingly, and even sent a column farther south to recapture Tafileh; the British believed that he was obeying Allenby’s orders to take Deraa and destroy the vital railroad junction. In fact, Lawrence had begun moving the bulk of the Arab forces away from Medina and the Hejaz, and from Aqaba and the sea, moving north unseen in the desert that only they could cross, toward Damascus. “The climax of the preaching of years had come, and a united country was straining towards its historic capital,” Lawrence wrote, something of an overstatement.

In the meantime, every Turkish soldier sent toward Amman weakened the forces that faced Allenby in the north, and every raid, smashed railway line, or smashed bridge to the south and east kept the Turks looking in the wrong direction. Allenby was a master of bluff—he had used it to persuade the Turks that he would attack Gaza, instead of moving to his right and enveloping Beersheba, and now he used Lawrence to persuade them that the crucial blow was coming from the east side of the Dead Sea toward Amman. Lawrence had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds and countless hours in securing the cooperation, or at least the temporary neutrality, of the tribes from Aqaba to Damascus. In Liddell Hart’s words, “He had removed the obstructions and paved the way,” and this was already something of a miracle. His exact plans were unclear, even to his staff and his superiors. Essentially, he would play cat and mouse with the Turks, hitting them where they least expected; then retreating back into the desert, hoping to destroy the railway junction at Deraa; then moving north from there to take Damascus. But “it was ever [his] habit, while studying alternatives, to keep the stages in solution.” In other words, his plans would remain flexible, and he would exploit opportunities as they arose, having secured a firm base deep in the desert at Azrak.

Ignoring the warning of Frederick the Great—"He who attempts to defend everything, defends nothing"—the Turks attempted to defend everything, in a huge arc from Medina to Maan to the Mediterranean, more than 300 miles long. Reacting violently to every pinprick on the periphery, the Turks were unable to maintain their lines of communication from one day to the next, thanks to Lawrence’s constant sabotage of their railway tracks and bridges.

Allenby compounded their confusion west of the Dead Sea by “creating dust columns with mule-drawn sleighs moving eastward by day, while troop columns marched [back] westward by night,” and by marching battalions toward the Jordan valley by day, then marching them back at night, so the Turks had the impression that Allenby’s whole army—"12,000 sabres, 57,000 rifles, and 540 guns"*—was methodically moving, unit by unit, toward the east. Fifteen thousand dummy horses made of canvas “filled the vacant horse lines in the interior,” forcing the enemy to conclude that the British were preparing to attack in force to the east and take Jericho. Lawrence contributed by buying up all the forage he could find east of the Dead Sea, paying in gold even as the price soared, hiding from nobody the fact that he was buying it to support the British cavalrymen when they crossed the Jordan and advanced northwest toward Damascus.