He was woken by a shot, but thought nothing of it at first, since there was game in the valley; then one of the party roused him and led him to a hollow in the cliff, where the body of one of the Ageyl camel men lay. The man had been shot in the head, at close range. After some initial confusion and discussion of the ethics of blood feuds, it was agreed thathe had been shot by another of the party, Hamed the Moor, following a brief quarrel between them. Lawrence crawled back to where he had been lying, beside the baggage, “feeling that this need not have happened this day of all days when I was in pain.” A noise made him open his eyes, and he saw Hamed, who had put his rifle down to pick up his saddlebags, no doubt preparing to run away. Lawrence drew his pistol, and Hamed confessed to the murder. At this point the others arrived, and the Ageyl’s fellow tribesmen demanded, as was their right, blood for blood. Lawrence, whose head was pounding, gave some thought to this. There were many Moors in the army, descendants of Moroccans who had fled to the Hejaz when the French took over their country, and if the remaining two Ageyl shot Hamed there would inevitably be a blood feud between the Moors and the Ageyl. Lawrence decided that as a stranger, a non-Muslim, and a man without a family, he could execute the Moor without creating a blood feud that might spread through the army. His traveling companions, after some discussion, agreed.

He marched Hamed at gunpoint into a narrow crevice in the cliff, “and gave him a few moments’ delay, which he spent crying on the ground,” then “made him rise and shot him through the chest.” Hamed fell to the ground, but was still alive and “shrieking,” as blood spurted from his wound, so Lawrence shot him again. By that time, Lawrence’s hand was shaking so badly that the bullet struck the dying man only in the wrist. Lawrence regained control of himself, moved closer, put the muzzle of his pistol to Hamed’s neck, under the jaw, and pulled the trigger.

That did it. The remaining Ageyl, for whose benefit Lawrence had carried out the execution, buried Hamed’s body, and after a sleepless night Lawrence was so ill that they had to lift him up into his saddle at daybreak.

Lawrence devotes only four paragraphs to Hamed’s execution in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and some of his biographers give the incident less space or even leave it out altogether; but despite the brevity, the obvious restraint, and the total lack of self-pity, his account clearly represents a turning point in the life of the former Oxford archaeologist and aestheteturned mapmaker and intelligence officer. He does not mention it again, perhaps because—as with so many things that happen in war—leaving it behind and moving on seemed more sensible. The prose in which Lawrence describes the experience, despite a tendency toward a certain florid and archaic quality when he is trying too hard to create the literary masterpiece that he hoped would take its place beside such great books as Moby-Dick, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Brothers Karamazov, is in this instance notably spare and lean. Indeed it is one of the places in Seven Pillars of Wisdom where Lawrence succeeds in striking exactly the tone that Ernest Hemingway spent his life perfecting: a shocking event is described in the bare minimum of words, and with no attempt to convey Lawrence’s feelings at killing another human being at close range. It is unlikely that he had none, but whatever they may have been, he does not share them with the reader. In the words of W. B. Yeats, he “cast a cold eye on life, on death,” and passed by.

Perhaps his own illness, and the greater importance in the grand scheme of things of reaching Emir Abdulla as soon as possible with the message about Medina (which, ironically, turned out to be false), helped Lawrence to put the incident out of his mind. But whatever the case, Hamed’s death marks the point at which Lawrence gave up the moral comfort of being a liaison officer, observing events from a distance, and transformed himself into a man of action, leading other men, sometimes to their death; killing Turks when he had to kill them; exposing himself to danger with a lack of fear, or even of caution, that astonished both the Bedouin and the British; and accepting unthinkable pain without complaint.

Shock finally set in, for Lawrence’s description of the next two days of his journey to Wadi Ais has a quality of desert hallucination. His meticulous description of the landscape conveys in its wealth of details a cumulative horror, which reaches a peak when during a rest he throws a rock at one of the party’s camels in disgust at its self-satisfied mastication. At one point Lawrence’s party stumbles across a Bedouin encampment and instead of letting him sleep outside, his host—"with the reckless equality” and hospitality “of desert men"—insists that Lawrence share his tent, so that Lawrence leaves in the morning with his “clothes stinging-full of fiery points feeding on us,” because of the lice and fleas. on the third day, crossing a “broken river of lava,” one of his camels breaks a leg in a pothole—the bones strewn around are mute testimony to the frequency with which this occurs—and Lawrence feels so sick that he fears some well-meaning tribesman will try to cure him, for the only method the Bedouin know is to burn a hole or holes in the patient’s body in a spot which is assumed to be opposite the site of the illness, a treatment often more painful than the disease, or to have a boy urinate into the wound.

At last he found Abdulla, in the process of setting up a new camp in a pleasant grove of acacia trees—as was always the case with Bedouin camps, the men and animals had fouled the old one by paying no attention at all to sanitary arrangements. Lawrence handed over the letters he had been carrying from Feisal, and explained the problem of Medina to Abdulla in his luxurious tent, although Abdulla did not seem much disturbed by or interested in it. Then, Lawrence collapsed in the adjacent tent that was pitched for him.

Lawrence spent about ten days in his tent “suffering a bodily weakness that made my animal self crawl away and hide till the shame was passed.” This surely refers to dysentery, a common enough illness among Europeans living with the Bedouin and unaccustomed to tainted water and unhygienic surroundings. Lawrence’s symptoms may also have been intensified by some degree of what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, brought about by the execution of Hamed. In any event, for ten days he rested and tried to recuperate in his stifling tent, drowsing, plagued by flies, and thinking about military strategy. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that any attempt to take Medina would be a mistake. As Lawrence himself put it, he “woke out of a hot sleep, running with sweat and pricking with flies, and wondered what on earth was the good of Medina to us?” In Colonel Lawrence, Liddell Hart bases his claim for Lawrence as a military genius on these sickbed musings in Abdulla’s camp. Indeed the conclusions that Lawrence reached about war, as he set them out in Seven Pillars of Wisdom five years later, define very well the kinds of warfare that big western armies found it so hard to win against through much of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty-first. First of all, Lawrence reached the conclusion that in “irregular warfare” it made no sense to hold or to seize a specific point. The goal was to strike the enemy where he least expected to be attacked, then vanish back into the desert, and to avoid, so far as possible, big battles in which the enemy could put to use his superior firepower and military discipline.

The object, he decided, should be to keep the Turks bottled up in Medina, where they could do no harm, and therefore to restrict, not cut, the railway that was their only line of communication with the rest of the Turkish army. Half-starved and reduced to eating their own transport animals, which were useless to them without forage, the Turks would no longer present a serious danger to Mecca, and could be reduced to exhaustion and impotence by frequent attacks on the railway, which they would constantly have to repair and defend—they would, in fact, be “all flanks and no front.” once Lawrence rose from his sickbed, he had a simple strategy for beating the Turks, not by fighting battles to take the fortresses and towns they held, but by destroying what they could neither easily replace nor defend: locomotives, railway cars, telegraph wires, bridges, and culverts. The Turks would have to spread themselves thin to defend these targets, and it would then be easier to attack and kill small Turkish parties. In short, a war of mobility was needed, a war in which the Arabs would use to the full their possession of camels and the protection of the desert in order to appear where they were least expected, and not anchor themselves in Wejh—or for that matter in Wadi Ais, where Abdulla was making himself too comfortable for Lawrence’s taste.