Plans were made for taking Wejh and its garrison. Boyle would take 500 of Feisal’s Arabs aboard one of his ships and land them on the north side of the town, to prevent the Turks from escaping, while Feisal’s army would simultaneously attack the south side of the town. Fortunately for Lawrence, Vickery wisely chose to proceed to Wejh by ship.

On January 18, Feisal’s army was on the move again; Feisal was gambling that Wejh would fall, for there were few reliable wells or springs along the way, nor was there any certainty that the local tribes would rally to him. It was like marching into the unknown with 10,000 men, half of them mounted, the other half on foot. Shortly after midday, Newcombe himself appeared, arriving by horse from Um Lejj. In theory, his arrival should have ended Lawrence’s adventure. Newcombe was not only Lawrence’s commanding officer, but also Feisal’s senior British adviser—unlike Vickery, though, he seems to have recognized at once that replacing Lawrence would be a mistake. “What do you want me to do?” was his first question to Lawrence, to which he added that “seniority didn’t matter a damn.” This was exactly what Lawrence wanted to hear. Vickery had made Lawrence acutely aware of both his junior rank and his anomalous position, leading Lawrence to believe that he would have to return to his desk job in Cairo as soon as Newcombe’s British mission was firmly in place.

Newcombe was soon aware that Feisal’s army moved at a ponderous pace, with no sense of urgency. Endless time was spent while Feisal met with local tribal leaders and tried to persuade them to join him, each meeting dragging on with time-wasting compliments, ceremonious politeness, and the obligatory cups of coffee and mint tea. Then there were all the difficulties of moving a large army across rough terrain with little or no water, compounded by the Arabs’ lack of time sense, and the difficulty of sending and acknowledging orders in an army that was largely illiterate. The men were already two days behind schedule by the time they reached Wadi Hamdh, where they were joined by the energetic young Sharif Nasir of Medina and his men, and where many of the local Billi tribes “came to swell the advancing host, and to consume more time in talk.” Newcombe rode ahead impatiently to see if he could reach the fleet about twenty miles south of Wejh, where the navy was supposed to unload goatskins full of water, but by the time he got there Boyle had lost patience and had already landed his 500 Arabs as well. Their lack of any habits of sanitation and their unfamiliarity with toilets and urinals hadmade them unwelcome passengers. Boyle then quickly engaged the Turks at Wejh with the guns of his six ships.

When the army approached Wejh on January 24, Lawrence was surprised to hear distant firing. This news galvanized the Arabs, who had worried that they might arrive too late to participate in looting the town. They plunged ahead to find only a few Turks still resisting. Vickery had commanded the assault, and with his 500 Arabs and the big guns of the navy vessels had successfully taken the town. This led to further bad blood between himself and Lawrence. Vickery was outraged by the slowness of Feisal’s army and the fact that it arrived too late to join in the assault; Lawrence was upset that twenty of Vickery’s Arabs had been killed. The fact that Vickery dismissed these as light losses and expressed his satisfaction with the result angered Lawrence, who felt that each Arab life was precious, and that in any case the whole fight had been unnecessary, since the Turkish garrison could have been surrounded and would have surrendered in two days without any loss of life on either side. In the meantime, the town had been looted by the Arabs (its inhabitants were mostly Egyptian and pro-Turk) and smashed to bits by the British naval bombardment. As a result, much rebuilding would have to be done before it could be used as a base.

Lawrence’s concern about the loss of twenty Arabs may seem odd during a war in which British war dead would exceed 750,000, but he felt strongly that “Our men were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting in our leadership.” Vickery had used the tribesmen for a formal assault, which Lawrence criticized as “silly,” since the Arabs were not trained for that, nor had it been necessary.

However it was won, the taking of Wejh transformed the Arab Revolt overnight. Although it was 150 miles from the railway line, the presence of a secure base and Feisal’s army so far north of Medina made the Turks aware of how fragile the link was between Medina and Maan. Far from being a dagger aimed at Mecca, Fakhri Pasha’s force at Medina now looked increasingly like marooned fugitives, separated from the main body of the Turkish army. To keep them supplied, special detachments had to beformed to guard the railway line, eventually rising to more than 12,000 men spread out for hundreds of miles along the line, the equivalent of a full division. Together with Fakhri Pasha’s troops at Medina, they made up three divisions of infantry that would be missing from the Turkish lines from Gaza to Beersheba when the British attacked there again.

Lawrence paid a flying visit to Cairo, where his stock was now higher, in pursuit of mountain guns, machine guns, and instructors, all of which Feisal would need if he was to make any real headway against the Turks. Although machine guns, instructors, and even mortars and armored cars were provided rapidly, the guns presented problems. The British, it turned out, had no modern artillery that could be disassembled and carried by camels; the French were well supplied with just such weapons, but Brйmond was determined to demand a price for them—they must be handled and served by his French North African troops (whose officers were French), and protected by a British brigade, rather than by the Arabs. Since the British, on Lawrence’s advice, were unwilling to send a brigade, and Feisal was unwilling to accept French officers, the guns sat at Suez, unused.

Although the date was January 1917, it was apparent to the farsighted—and nobody was more farsighted and realistic than Lawrence—that putting artillery of any kind in the hands of the Arabs might make it very much harder to impose the terms of a settlement for the Middle East on them after the war. Nobody wanted to talk about the Sykes-Picot agreement, but the knowledge of its terms was already beginning to determine the Allies’ policy, even though the bear’s hide was being shared out before the bear had been killed. Brйmond’s attempts to persuade Lawrence, and later Feisal, that British forces (with the help of the French) should take Aqaba made it obvious that the French hoped to reach Damascus and stake their claim to Syria before Feisal did. Brйmond was already reporting back to Paris on Lawrence’s anti-French sentiments as if he were an enemy rather than an ally, although he would recommend Lawrence twice for a Croix de Guerre and to be made a chevalier of the Lйgion d’Honneur. Lawrence refused to acknowledge both honors or wear the decorations.

The capture of Wejh changed the nature of the Arab struggle. It brought Feisal new Bedouin allies from the vast desert area to the north of Medina, including what is now Jordan, and stretching into Syria and as far to the west as Lebanon and Palestine on the Mediterranean coast. The possibility of transforming a localized revolt in the Hejaz into a broader pan-Arab revolt that might be supported by Arabs in cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, and Jerusalem made Feisal, quite suddenly, a more important figure than his brothers, who remained behind with the thankless task of either besieging Medina or assaulting it, neither of which they ever succeeded in doing. It also increased Lawrence’s importance, since he was the Englishman who was closest to Feisal, and the only one who might reasonably claim to know what was on Feisal’s mind.