Lawrence had not bothered to inform Cairo where he was going, or with what object, and he had no idea what was happening in the rest of the war. He did not therefore know that General Murray’s second attack on Gaza had failed, like the first. Gaza was no easy nut to crack—with the help of the Germans, the Turks had fortified their trenches, taking advantage of every piece of high ground and of the impenetrably thick hedges and clumps of cactus (considered worse by the troops than barbed wire), in which they had carefully sited machine gun nests. On the British side, despite huge efforts to build a small-gauge railway line to bring supplies and ammunition forward and to lay a water line, neither had been completed. Murray’s plan of attack was therefore hamstrung, since he required more than 400,000 gallons of water a day for men, animals, and vehicles. He had a large mounted force of about 11,000 sabers, and an overwhelming superiority of numbers in infantry, as well as an artillery strength of more than 170 guns (as well as a naval bombardment of Gaza from the sea, and the first use of tanks and poison gas in the Middle East); but the Turks still managed to hold their ground, and since the only way of securing water was to take Gaza, the British, having failed to do so, were obliged to break off the battle. Murray had inflicted 1,300 casualties on the Turks, at the cost of 3,000 British and Commonwealth casualties. Both Lawrence and Liddell Hart would later point out that Lawrence’s tiny force had inflicted almost the same number of casualties on the Turks for a loss of only two men!

The resulting stalemate—a miniature reproduction of the situationon the western front—was made worse by Murray’s overoptimistic dispatches home during the first battle of Gaza, which had produced first jubilation, then consternation in the war cabinet as the facts became known. The prime minister remained determined to knock Turkey out of the war, and looked for a stronger commander for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was decided to replace Murray with General Sir Edmund Allenby, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, a powerful, impatient, hard-thrusting cavalryman, know as “the bull” to men who served under him, because of both his size and his fearsome temper. Allenby had fought brilliantly in the Boer War, but quarreled badly there with Douglas Haig, who was now the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces in France. Allenby, who violently disagreed with Haig’s tactics, had promptly crossed him again, and as a result it was thought wise to give Allenby a command as far away from France as possible. It was also hoped that as a cavalryman who had chafed at trench warfare he would bring a new level of energy and drive to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF).

When Allenby took his leave of Lloyd George in London, the prime minister told him “that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people.” Considering that the British army had been stuck outside Gaza for two years, this was a tall order, but Allenby, his spirits and self-confidence buoyed by being released from Haig’s command and given a show of his own, set to work immediately to breathe new life into the EEF. A consummate professional soldier, he moved his headquarters forward to Rafah,* only nineteen miles from the front line at Gaza, instead of trying to command the army from Cairo, where General Murray had preferred to remain. Allenby immediately set out to see everything he could with his own eyes, instead of relying on his staff officers for information, another failing of Murray’s. He knew he could expect no reinforcements, given the pressure on the western front, and would have to make do with what he had. He also understood at once that advancing up the coast to attack Gaza for the third time would get him nowhere. Hewould need to surprise the Turks with a new strategy, one that made use of the vast, empty desert area to the east to go around the Turkish lines and fortifications that stretched from Gaza on the Turkish right to Beersheba on their left. But what kind of army could travel great distances over a waterless desert?

Meanwhile, in Aqaba Lawrence faced two urgent problems: the first was feeding his men and his prisoners; the second was defending Aqaba against a Turkish attack, which Lawrence estimated would take about ten days. To protect Aqaba, Lawrence made use of his skill at creating maps to pick four independent strongpoints, each of which the Turks would have to attack separately if they were going to advance down Wadi Itm. He put Auda in command of one of them, and chose carefully from among the tribes to man the others. To obtain food and supplies, there was only one course open to him—to leave Aqaba and ride 150 miles across the Sinai desert to the Suez Canal. The terrain is some of the harshest in the world, with only one well between Aqaba and the Suez Canal, and the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai had the reputation of being predatory and pro-Turk.

Taking only seven men with him—one of them would have to drop out and return to Aqaba because his camel was unfit—Lawrence set off on July 7 to bring the news of the Arab victory to Cairo. Riding continuously at a walk with only short intervals of rest, in order not to exhaust their camels, the small party arrived at Shatt, on the canal, on July 9, a journey of forty-nine hours, which pushed both men and camels to their limit, crossing over Mitla Pass* and then across the shifting, rolling dunes to the east bank of the canal. Occasional heaps of rusting, empty army-ration bully beef cans in the desert marked the approach to civilization.

There, the natural lethargy of army administration took over, as if to mark Lawrence’s passage from Asia and the Arabs back to the world of uniforms, regulations, and orders. The lines at Shatt, it turned out, had been abandoned because of an outbreak of plague. Lawrence picked up a telephone in an abandoned office hut and found it still working. He rang general headquarters at Suez and asked for a boat to take him across the canal, but was told that this was no business of the army’s, and that he would have to call Inland Water Transport. Though he explained the importance of his mission, Inland Water Transport was indifferent. It might try to send a boat tomorrow, to take him to the Quarantine Department. He called again, and argued his case more vehemently, but this did no good—he was cut off. Finally, “a sympathetic northern accent from the military exchange” came on the line: “It’s no bluidy good, Sir, talking to them fooking water boogars: they’re all the same.” The kindly operator finally managed to put Lawrence through to Major Lyttleton at Port Tewfik. Lyttleton handled cargo shipments for the Arab forces at Jidda, Yenbo, and Wejh, and promised to have his launch at Shatt in half an hour. Once Lawrence reached Port Tewfik, Lyttleton took one look at him in his verminous, filthy robes, and brought him straight to the Sinai Hotel, where Lawrence had a hot bath, his first in months, iced lemonades, dinner, and a real bed, while his men were sent northward to “the animal camp on the Asiatic side” in Kubri, and provided with rations and bedding.

The next morning, on the train to Cairo via Ismailia, Lawrence played a game of hide-and-seek for his own amusement, in the true Oxford undergraduate tradition, with the Royal Military Police. There was nothing he enjoyed more than confronting puzzled and vexed minor authorities with the unfamiliar contrast of his blue-eyed face and upper-class accent and his present costume of Arab robes and bare feet. Although he carried a special pass issued to him by Major Lyttleton, identifying him as a British officer, Lawrence wanted to go as far as he could before showing it, and no doubt to annoy as many people on the way as possible. This kind of thing—combining a perverse schoolboy fondness for practical jokes with a flamboyant flaunting of his unmilitary ways and special privileges—was to become something of a specialty of Lawrence’s as his fame increased.