Once Sykes and Picot brought the agreement to Petrograd for the approval of the czarist government, they found themselves obliged to cut the Russians in on the deal—imperial Russia insisted on fulfilling its old ambition of annexing Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, as well as much of Armenia, and also insisted that control of the Holy Land—i.e., Palestine—be shared among the three powers, so as to place the Christian holy sites under the protection of France (nominally Catholic), Russia (representing the Russian, Greek, and Serbian Orthodox churches), and Great Britain (Protestant) and thus to satisfy religious opinion in the three major Christian faiths. In November 1917 the situation would be further complicated by two events. First, immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they published all of imperial Russia’s secret treaties, to the great embarrassment of the French and the British. Second, in London the Times published Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild, stating publicly that the British government would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This letter injected a further religious and racial element into an area which also contained Muslim holy sites and a largely Muslim population, and which most Arabs believed was part of the territory they were fighting for.

Though both Lawrence and Feisal would later claim ignorance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, this was certainly not true of the former, and probably not true of the latter. The British, in their endless negotiations with Sharif Hussein, had always been careful to avoid agreeing to any specific frontiers for “the Arab nation,” and had pointed out, though without much emphasis or detail, that France and Britain had certain “historic” claims to territory in the Ottoman Empire that would have to be respected. This insistence that the division of the spoils should come after the Allies’ victory was intended in part to get the Arabs fighting. The idea left floating delicately in the air, and expressed withexquisite diplomatic tact by Kitchener, Wilson, Storrs, and others, was that the harder the Arabs fought, the more they might hope to claim at the peace table; but it was also a reaction to Sharif Hussein’s breathtaking and meticulously detailed demand to be made king of an Arab nation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and including all of what is now Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

Eager to get the Arabs to start fighting the Turks, the British did not deny the sharif’s claims; they merely cautioned him that they and the French would have to be satisfied, and that discussion of the exact frontiers of an Arab nation would have to wait until the peace conference following the Allies’ victory. In the meantime, Britain had already taken and occupied a sizable part of Mesopotamia, including Basra and Baghdad, in part to ensure a steady supply of oil for the Royal Navy, and also wanted control of the approaches to the Suez Canal; France had, or claimed, strong historic ties with Lebanon and Syria going back to the days of the Crusades; and neither country wished to see Jerusalem in Arab hands.

The sharif of Mecca was only too well aware of the fact that Britain, France, and Russia would have to be satisfied, as was his son Abdulla, who had been directly involved in the negotiations, so it seems likely that some hint of the problem would have made its way to Feisal, though the sharif’s policy toward his allies and his sons was to simply ignore what he didn’t want to hear. In much the same way, the sharif affected to ignore the fact that his rivals in the Arabian Peninsula, particularly ibn Saud, as well as the educated and highly politicized elite in Damascus, were hardly likely to accept him as their king.

Lawrence’s guilt at encouraging the Arabs to fight even though he knew they were not going to get what they wanted (and what they thought they had been promised) would become increasingly severe as the war went on and as his place in the Arab Revolt increased in importance. It was the reason why he would refuse to accept any of the honors and decorations he was awarded; it was at the root of his self-disgust and shame;it would eventually make him follow a strategy of his own, urging Feisal and the Arabs on in an effort to reach Damascus before the British or the French entered the city, and declare an independent Arab nation whose existence could not be denied at the peace conference—a grand, sublime gesture would, he hoped, render the Sykes-Picot agreement null and void in the eyes of the world.

Lawrence’s mention of Damascus when he first met Feisal was thus both a challenge and the equivalent of a knowing wink: an indication that here, at least, was one Englishman who understood what Feisal really wanted—a so-called “Greater Syria,” long the ambition of Arab nationalists, which would include Lebanon (and its ports) as its Mediterranean seacoast and, of course, Damascus as its capital. Attacking Medina, even taking it, would hardly get Feisal any nearer to Damascus than he was at Wadi Safra. Medina was more than 800 miles from Damascus, and so long as Feisal’s army was stuck in the desert halfway between Medina and Mecca, with no roads or railway to supply it, Damascus might as well have been on the moon. The British—accompanied by just enough French officers and French Muslim North African specialist units to stake out France’s claim to Lebanon and Syria when they got there—were still trying to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza, which was only 175 miles away from Damascus as the crow flies. It was not enough for Feisal and his brothers merely to defend Mecca against Fakhri Pasha. If the Arab army, whatever its deficiencies, could not move north, leapfrogging past Medina, and win some highly publicized victories along the way, Hussein’s claim to a kingdom and the hopes of Arab nationalists would both be stillborn.

Lawrence and Feisal understood each other on this point, but it was not yet clear to Feisal how to accomplish the goal with the ill-armed and unreliable forces at his command. It was Lawrence’s strategic imagination, and his determination to make the British high command in Cairo not only accept his vision but finance and support what most of this command thought was unlikely or impossible, that would make himself and Feisal famous within a year and start Feisal on a path that would reshapethe Middle East and lead to the creation of new nations and frontiers that are still in place today, for better or for worse.*

At the end of their second long talk together, Lawrence promised to return, if he was allowed to, after he had seen to Feisal’s needs, and requested from Feisal an escort to take him to Yenbo, rather than back to Rabegh. This was an interesting decision, since it shows how Lawrence’s mind worked. The port of Yenbo was in Arab hands, though lightly and precariously held, but it was more than 100 miles north of Rabegh, and in fact actually behind Medina. The ride to Yenbo was considerably longer and more difficult than the ride back to Rabegh, but it was at Yenbo that he had arranged to be picked up by the Royal Navy.

He left Hamra at sunset, accompanied by an escort of fourteen handpicked tribesmen; rode down the Wadi Safra back to the village of Kharma in the darkness; then turned right and climbed up a steep “side valley,” full of thorn and brushwood, onto an ancient stone causeway, an old pilgrim route, until they reached a well and a ruined fort, where they rested. At daylight they moved on again through a lunar landscape of hardened lava, “huge crags of flowing surface but with a bent and twisted texture, as though it had been played with oddly while soft,” set in a sea of shifting sand dunes. They began riding quickly—to Lawrence’s great discomfort, for he was not yet accustomed to the motions of a swiftly moving camel—onward into the intense heat of the day over “glassy sand mixed with shingle,” where the reflected sunlight soon became unbearable, and each drop of sweat coursing down his face was a torture.