One point that the indefatigable Jeremy Wilson has clearly demonstrated in his exhaustive authorized biography is that there is always a germ of truth in every story Lawrence told about himself, though over the years Lawrence sometimes improved and embellished such stories. Taranto seems much more likely as the place where this occurred, first of all because there were more British troops at Taranto, but also because it had been only a matter of days then since General Chauvel’s inopportune complaint in Damascus about the Arabs’ failing to salute British officers, so the subject of saluting may still have been very much on Lawrence’s mind. This was also the first time in more than two years that Lawrence was dressed in a British uniform and found himself among British officers and men. In the desert, he had neither saluted nor encouraged British personnel below his rank to salute him. Now he was back in the army. He was returning to a world where rank mattered and class distinctions were absolute, a world very different from the rough simplicity of desert warfare.

He arrived home “on or about October 24th,” but spent only a few days with his family in Oxford before getting down to the business of securing Syria for Feisal and the Arabs. Only four days later, thanks to Winterton’s letter of introduction, he had a long interview with Lord Robert Cecil, perhaps the most eminent, respectable, and idealistic figure in Lloyd George’s government. Cecil was a son of the marquess of Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister who had dominated late Victorian politics; the Cecil family traced its tradition of public service back to 1571, when Queen Elizabeth I made William Cecil her lord treasurer. Robert Cecil was an Old Etonian, an Oxonian, a distinguished and successful lawyer, an architect of the League of Nations, and a firm believer in Esperanto as a universal common language. He would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, among many other honors. The fact that he was willing to see Lawrence on such short notice is a tribute not only to Lord Winterton’s reputation, but to Lawrence’s growing fame as a hero. Of course he was not yet the celebrity he would become when Lowell Thomas had established him in the public mind as “Lawrence of Arabia,” but his service in the desert was already sufficiently well known to open doors that would surely have remained closed to anyone else. Cecil’s notes on the meeting—in which he shrewdly comments that Lawrence always refers to Feisal and the Arabs as “we"—make it clear that Lawrence’s ideas on the future of the Middle East were both intelligent and far-reaching, and were viewed with sympathy by one of the most influential figures in what would later come to be called “the establishment.” The next day, Lawrence had an equally long and persuasive discussion with Lieutenant-General Sir George Macdonogh, GBE, KCB, KCMG, adjutant-general of the British army, and creator of MI7, an intelligence unit intended to sabotage German morale. Macdonogh, who was very well informed about the Middle East, afterward circulated to the war cabinet a long and admiring report on his discussion with Lawrence, the gist of which was that the Sykes-Picot agreement should be dropped, Syria should be “under the control” of Feisal, Feisal’s half brother Zeid should rule northern Mesopotamia, and Feisal’s brother Abdulla should rule southern Mesopotamia—in short, Lawrence converted Macdonogh.

Perhaps as a result of the “Macdonogh memorandum,” Lawrence was invited to address the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet on October 29, only five days after he had arrived back in Britain. Deducting two days for the time he had spent with his family in Oxford, Lawrence had reached the highest level of the British government in seventy-two hours. Judging from Macdonogh’s memorandum, he did so first by the lucidity and intelligence of his ideas, and second because what he had to say was viewed with intense sympathy. The British government believed, like Lawrence, that the Sykes-Picot agreement should be discarded; that Arabs and Zionists should cooperate in Palestine under the protection of a British administration; that Mesopotamia should be an Arab “protectorate,” ruled from Cairo, not from Delhi; and that Arab ambitions (and British promises) in Syria should be respected. If Lawrence was not quite preaching to the converted, he was at any rate preaching to those who were prepared to convert. On the other hand, since there were still few signs that the war was about to end suddenly—in twenty-three days, in fact—the general feeling was that there was still plenty of time to bring the French around to this point of view. The British also believed that Woodrow Wilson would certainly denounce the Sykes-Picot agreement as a perfect example of secret diplomacy, which he wanted to end once and for all. Lawrence, who had after all stopped in Rome to talk directly to Picot, had a good idea of just how intransigent the French were likely to be; but perhaps sensibly, he does not seem to have raised this with either Cecil or Macdonogh.

In any event, Lawrence’s appearance at the Eastern Committee of the war cabinet is almost as much of a puzzle for biographers as the story about the saluting incident at Taranto or Marseille. He himself once said that he “was more a legion than a man,” a reference to the man from Gadara whose name was “Legion” because he was possessed by so many demons. Lawrence found no difficulty in presenting different versions of himself to people throughout his lifetime, hence the often wildly conflicting reactions to him.

The meeting was chaired by the Rt. Hon. the Earl Curzon, KG, GSCI, GCIE, PC, former viceroy of India, leader of the House of Lords, one of the most widely traveled men ever to sit in a British cabinet, and perhaps one of the most formidable and hardworking political figures of his time. A graduate of Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he was in some respects everything that Lawrence was not: his career at Oxford had been glittering, both academically and socially; he was renowned for his arrogance and inflexibility (caused in part by the fact that a riding injury in his youth obliged him to wear a steel corset that inflicted on him unceasing, lifelong pain, and made his posture seem unnaturally stiff and straight). His attitude toward life was grandly aristocratic, so that he sometimes seemed more appropriate to the eighteenth than to the twentieth century.

As Lawrence later told the story, he sat before the committee while Curzon made a long speech, outlining and praising Lawrence’s feats—a speech that for some reason Lawrence “chafed at.” Lawrence may, as he later complained, have found this speech patronizing, particularly since he knew most of the members of the committee, but it is more likely that Curzon’s grandiloquent manner simply rubbed him the wrong way. In any case, once Curzon finished, he asked if Lawrence wished to say anything, and Lawrence answered: “Yes, let’s get to business. You people don’t understand yet the hole you have put us all into.”

Lawrence, writing to Robert Graves in 1927, added: “Curzon burst promptly into tears, great drops running down his cheeks, to an accompaniment of slow sobs. It was horribly like a mediaeval miracle, a lachryma Christi, happening to a Buddha. Lord Robert Cecil, hardened to such scenes, presumably, interposed roughly, ‘Now old man, none of that.’ Curzon dried up instanter.” Lawrence then warned Graves, “I doubt if I’d publish it, if you do, don’t put it on my authority. Say a late member of the F.O. [Foreign Office] Staff told you.”

There are many questions about this account, some of which are obvious. First, why would Curzon ask if there was anything Lawrence wished to say, since Lawrence’s whole reason for being there was to speak to the committee? Second, it is hard to imagine Lord Robert Cecil, the most gentlemanly of men, speaking to anyone “roughly.” The spectacle of Curzon sobbing at a meeting of a committee of the war cabinet would certainly have startled the other members, and in fact, after Graves’s biography of Lawrence was published, Cecil wrote to Curzon’s daughter, Lady Cynthia Mosley,* denying that the incident had ever happened: “I feel quite certain that your father never burst into tears, and I am even more certain that I have never addressed him in the way described under any circumstances.” As for Curzon’s speech about Lawrence, Cecil wrote: “Colonel Lawrence listened with the most marked attention, and spoke to me afterwards in the highest appreciation of your father’s attitude.”