Lawrence had planned to make a journey to some of the principal sites mentioned in Seven Pillars of Wisdomwith Eric Kennington, the distinguished war artist, who had caused a sensation in London with his modernist depictions of troops in the trenches. The paintings appealed to Lawrence as a contrast to the more formal portraits he planned to have painted, and he was reluctant to cancel the trip. (After Lawrence’s death Kennington carved both an effigy of Lawrence in the medieval style, and the bust of him, a copy of which is placed in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.) Lawrence was simultaneously tempted and repelled by the thought of returning to the Middle East, but he swiftly developed for Churchill the same intense mixture of affection, loyalty, and respect that he had for Allenby, and eventually he allowed himself to be won over, as Churchill had been confident he would be. Lawrence attempted to set as a prior condition that all Britain’s promises to the Arabs should be met, but Churchill refused to do this.Lawrence gave in—indeed he can hardly have expected that Churchill would agree to totally abandon the Sykes-Picot agreement, and undermine both Britain’s and France’s positions in the Middle East.

Lawrence’s success with Feisal before he had even accepted a job, and almost a month before Churchill formally took office, demonstrated just how valuable he would be. For all his occasionally erratic or emotional decisions, Churchill was an experienced politician, who wanted to be in a position to claim that he had listened to more than one opinion.Lawrence’s role as political adviser and emissary to the Arabs was vital to the success of Churchill’s mission, but he carefully balanced Lawrence’s pro-Arab views by adding to his staff Sir John Shuckburgh as assistant undersecretary; an experienced civil servant, Lawrence’s old chief Sir Gilbert Clayton, as military adviser; Hubert Young, once appointed as Lawrence’s understudy during the Arab Revolt; and Richard Meinertzhagen, who had been Lawrence’s confidant at the Hotel Continental during the Paris Peace Conference. Clayton, with his background in military intelligence and his knowledge of Egypt, was the perfect man to prevent friction between the War Office and the ebullient new secretary of state for the colonies. Young—who had clashed with Lawrence in 1917 and 1918, had been co-opted by the Foreign Office, and over time had been converted to Lawrence’s views on Middle Eastern policy—might be trusted to keep Lord Curzon from interfering. Meinertzhagen, whose fervent and uncritical enthusiasm for Zionism was almost unique among British officers, could be trusted to reach out to the Jewish communities in Palestine and to represent their point of view forcefully. Churchill would soon add to this group Gertrude Bell, whose knowledge of Iraqi politics and personalities would be of great value. Although Lawrence had irritated Gertrude Bell with his newspaper campaign in favor of Feisal and his doubts about ibn Saud, they had been friends for too long not to patch up their differences. As for Young, he and Lawrence had long since made peace; and Lawrence was under the impression that he himself and Meinertzhagen were friends. Indeed, it may not have been until much later that Meinertzhagen began to revise his diaries to represent a very different view of “little Lawrence,” remarking that Churchill’s attitude “almost amounted to hero worship,” and that Lawrence was “a most remarkable man, with a most remarkable record, but as unscrupulous as he is dangerous. His meek schoolboy expression hides the cunning of a fox and the intriguing spirit of the East…. We all know that Lawrence is a humbug, though as able as a monkey. ” He was later to change his mind again; after Lawrence’s death, he wrote, “I cherish his memory. ” But whatever Meinertzhagen really thought of Lawrence, the two of them worked together well enough under Churchill.

Lawrence became a civil servant on February 18, 1920, at a salary of Ј1,600 a year—about $120,000 a year in today’s terms. He had asked for only Ј1,000, but Churchill dismissed this at once as too modest, and said, “We’ll make it Ј1,600,” enough to enable Lawrence to fund Kennington’s journey to the Middle East alone to do the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence had decided not to spend any of his salary on himself beyond the bare necessities, since he did not think it was right to accept money for trying to invent a solution to a problem he had helped to cause. Lawrence then sat down in a room at the Colonial Office, which he shared with Young, and on their first day together, they drew up the agenda for the meeting Churchill planned to hold in Cairo. “Talk of leaving things to the man on the spot,” Lawrence wrote; “we left nothing.”

As John Mack points out in A Prince of Our Disorder,it had always been Lawrence’s habit to work through older and more powerful figures, influencing them in the direction he wanted them to go, but remaining in their shadow and carefully not seeking any personal credit. He had worked that way with Hogarth, with Clayton, and with Allenby—it was only in the desert, with Feisal, that he had stepped hesitantly into the limelight himself, tempted by the opportunity he was offered to carry out in practice his own theories about warfare, and to test his own courage and endurance in the hardest conditions imaginable. Even there, when he was in Feisal’s presence he did his best to stay in the background, as the adviser and liaison officer, not the bold guerrilla leader, always careful to suggest by indirection, until eventually he and Feisal began to think as one, and each could predict what the other would say or do. He quickly achieved the same kind of relationship with Churchill.

Lawrence and Young not only drew up the agenda for Churchill’s meeting in Cairo, but so far as possible tried to provide both the questions and the answers, to ensure that there should be no surprises or disagreements. Lawrence’s recommendation to Churchill was succinct: “You must take risks, make a native king in Iraq, and hand over defence to the RAF instead of the Army.” Lawrence’s experience working in tandem with the air force in the desert had given him a good understanding of how a comparatively small number of aircraft could produce a disproportionate effect on relatively primitive tribal forces. He saw very clearly that the object should never be to invade or occupy territory with troops—a waste of time, manpower, and money against nomadic or seminomadic people—but to threaten punishment from the air and, only when necessary, carry it out. Relatively speaking, it was even humane; aircraft could drop leaflets on the rebellious natives warning that they would return to bomb a specific target the next day, and so long as there was someone on the ground who could read, women, children, herds, and flocks could be removed to safety. Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, KCB, KCMG, DSO, who had commanded the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East during the war, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO, the “founder of the Royal Air Force” and its first chief of the air staff, knew Lawrence, and were in sympathy with his ideas, as well as eager to prove that a few squadrons of aircraft could “police” a whole country. The result was that from its creation in 1921 to the end of the renewed British occupation during World War II, Iraq was a proving ground for Lawrence’s visionary ideas about air power; and for several decades the principal RAF base at Habbaniya, outside Baghdad, was one of the largest military airfields in the world. Lawrence had no trouble persuading Churchill of his views, and still less in suggesting who the “native king” of Iraq should be.

In his book about Lawrence, the military historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote: “Lawrence can bear comparison with … Napoleon in that vital faculty of generalship, the power of grasping instantly the picture of the ground and situation, of relating the one to the other. He generated too the same electric current of command.” While this is high praise, coming from such a distinguished critic of strategy, what Liddell Hart did not point out was that Lawrence’s genius for diplomacy and politics was, if anything, more striking. He anticipated by more than fifty years Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy,” using aircraft to fly from one leader to another throughout the Middle East in intensive bursts of negotiation and persuasion, restlessly pursuing consensus before second thoughts had time to sink in among his interlocutors. It was not just that he was a young man in a hurry—he was perhaps the first person to appreciate that speed, in diplomacy as in warfare, was a vital weapon, and that keeping up the pressure was the best way to produce agreement.