* Lawrence’s spelling of Arabic names and places is erratic, and so is Storrs’s, but I have preferred to quote from letters and documents as they were written, rather than imposing on them a false conformity.

* The “corpse-like obedience” much prized in the German army.

* Liddell Hart also compared Lawrence to Sherlock Holmes for “his extraordinary perceptiveness of details which other men missed.”

* others to whom he had a similarly intense initial reaction included his archaeological mentor D. G. hogarth; the english explorer of Arabia Charles Doughty; Field Marshal Lord Allenby; Winston Churchill; Marshal of the royal Air Force Lord trenchard, founder of the rAF; George Bernard Shaw; and Thomas hardy.

* Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd ar-Rahman ibn Faysal ibn Turki Abd Allah ibn Muhammad Al Saud (c. 1880–1953), referred to as ibn Saud.

* This was in part because the French consul in Beirut, Franзois Georges-Picot, had fled from the consulate at the outbreak of war between the ottoman empire and France, leaving behind him in his desk drawer the names of Arab notables in Lebanon and Syria who had been in touch with him about Arab independence in the event turkey entered the war. For many of those on his list it was a sentence of death– twenty-one of them were hanged in 1916, many after months of terrible torture.

† Lawrence was foremost among the British officers who would teach the Arabs everything there was to know about dynamite, gun cotton, and more modern high explosives, thus preparing the way for the roadside bomb and the suicide vest as a means of political statement or revenge in the Middle east.

* The voracious thievery of the Arabs against friend and foe alike was a complaint of all foreign troops in Arab lands, shared by the German, British, and American armies in North Africa during World War ii. Another complaint was the Arabs’ indifference toward digging sanitation trenches and carrying out other basic hygiene routines common to all european-trained armies in the field.

* It should be understood that neither Lawrence nor Feisal imagined the present-day frontiers. Feisal had in mind a much larger, unitary Arab state, with his father as its king. Lawrence knew that the Arabs would have to give up some of the places they wanted, in order to satisfy British and French ambitions in the area; but his own map of the Middle east after victory, which he drafted in 1918 for the British cabinet, also shows a far larger state than the Arabs got in the shape of Jordan and iraq.

CHAPTER TWO

Aqaba, 1917: The Making of a Hero

Lawrence left Cairo on November 25, 1916, and arrived back in Yenbo early on December 2, having spent no more than ten days in Cairo while his future was being decided. He was pleased to be nearly 200 miles away from Colonel Wilson in Jidda, and to discover that Wilson had already sent Major H. G. Garland to Yenbo to teach the Arabs how to handle explosives, and to keep track of incoming supplies. Lawrence was ambivalent regarding Garland, whose expertise about explosives was vital if the railway to Medina was to be cut, but whose attitude toward the Arabs distressed him. Garland was a former metallurgist, caustic and quick tempered, but his joy in setting off large, destructive explosions fortunately communicated itself to the Arabs. He took the time to teach Lawrence the rudiments of demolition, which Garland approached rather in the spirit of enthusiastic amateur than in the cautious, step-by-step manner of the Royal Engineers, who, Lawrence complained, treated explosives like the “sacrament.” Garland stuffed volatile detonators, fuses, and primers carelessly into his pockets; tossed explosives around as if they were tennis balls; and encouraged in Lawrence a similar fearlessness on the subject. He taught Lawrence notonly how to use high explosives but how to inflict the maximum damage to the railway, by blowing up culverts and bridges and by taking the time and trouble to destroy as many rails as possible, especially the curved rails—which, because they were in short supply, were harder for the Turks to replace than straight ones. Garland, as it turned out, was a jack-of-all-trades, who could repair machine guns, improvise an artillery plan, lay out a defense perimeter, supervise the digging of trenches, and give lessons in the use of grenades, one pattern of which he had invented himself. He was hardworking and efficient, so much so that Lawrence was able without great trouble to shift onto Garland’s shoulders the uncongenial job of being a glorified supply officer at Yenbo.

In some ways, the situation seemed better than it had when Lawrence had traveled to Rabegh less than two months earlier. The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) had finally overcome its nervousness about stationing aircraft in Rabegh; there was now a flight of four British aircraft, under the command of an officer who spoke Arabic, and guarded by 300 Egyptian soldiers who were more alarmed by their Arab allies than by the threat of a Turkish attack. The RFC flight was more important, at the moment, for carrying out aerial reconnaissance than for attacking Turkish warplanes, but its presence was heartening to the Arabs. General Wingate had scraped up from the Sudan whatever he could in the way of light artillery—most of it antiquated, some of it French—and sent it over, as a sop to Colonel Brйmond. The mere sight of these guns was encouraging to the Arabs, and the sound of them was even more so. Lawrence could feel that the promises he had rashly made to Feisal were being kept, and it was therefore with some confidence that he rode with a guide up to the broadest part of Wadi Yenbo, where Feisal and his army were reported to be. As night fell they heard the noise of a sizable force in front of them. Lawrence’s guide dismounted and moved forward, cocking his rifle, fearing that they might have stumbled into a Turkish force, but he soon came back with the news that Feisal’s army was spread out from one side of the wadi to the other; the size of the force was indicated by the discontented roar and grumbling of hundreds of camels and by the number of tiny fires flickering in the dark.

Unfortunately, the numerous fires had been lit because it was cold and wet—a recent rain had turned the floor of Wadi Yenbo into slimy mud, and men and animals were uncomfortable and disgruntled. Amid all the confusion and noise—the Arabs tended to waste ammunition firing off shots into the night sky to keep their spirits up, or to greet late arrivals—Lawrence finally located Feisal seated calmly on a carpet spread on the rocks, surrounded by baggage camels, while one of his secretaries read reports aloud to him by the light of a lantern held above his head by a slave. Meanwhile, Arab tribal leaders and notables waited in the dark to complain to him. Around Feisal was incredible disorder—camels everywhere, filling the night with their noise and the smell of their dung; the mules of the Egyptian gunners braying and kicking; men spread out in the mud next to the animals, trying to sleep with their cloaks wrapped around them—the perfect picture of an army on the run. The Turks, Feisal explained, had outflanked his army and sent it flying headlong in retreat toward Yenbo, opening up the way to Rabegh and Mecca, and taking the area around Hamra, with its wells, where Lawrence had first met Feisal only a few weeks ago. Feisal’s half brother Zeid had been forced to flee, leaving much of his baggage behind and abandoning a key position, while many of Feisal’s tribal contingents had faded into the hills. Feisal had thought it best to cut his losses and retreat far enough so that he could fall back on Yenbo if the Turks continued to attack. It was exactly the kind of debacle that British doubters had always predicted would happen if the Turks attacked the Arab irregulars, and that Lawrence had convinced Wingate, Murray, Clayton, and the CIGS in London would not. It was not as if the Turks had inflicted serious losses; the Arabs had fled before any serious fighting took place.