Storrs would later describe the intelligence group in a little poem, with his usual urbane wit, as:

Clayton stability,

Symes versatility,

Cornwallis is practical,

Dawnay syntactical,Mackintosh havers,And Fielding palavers,Macindoe easy,And Wordie not breezy:Lawrence licentiate to dream and to dareAnd Yours Very Faithfully, bon а tout faire. It was not instantly apparent that Lawrence’s role would be “to dream and to dare,” and he may not have even realized it himself yet. He was, in fact, despite his eagerness to get back to the Middle East now that he was in uniform at last, delayed for weeks in London. The “general officer commanding” (GOC) in Egypt had wired the War Office for a map of the roads of the Sinai, which it didn’t have, so Lawrence was put to the task of converting and expanding The Wilderness of Zin into a military document. He belittled his own work, and joked that he had to make up or invent much of it and that he would hate to be sent into a battle using his own maps, but it was finally done by the end of November. He complained that he had now written the same book twice, both times without pay—and on December 9 he and Newcombe finally took the train for Marseille, and from there sailed to Egypt.

He was preceded by a message from the director of military operations in the War Office to the GOC in Egypt, General Sir John Maxwell, introducing him as: “a youngster, 2nd Lt. Lawrence who has wandered about in the Sinai Peninsula, and who came in here to help in the Map Branch.” Not every second-lieutenant is posted overseas with an introduction from one general to another, but even at this early stage of the war, with only one pip on his sleeve, Lawrence was being treated as someone of unusual importance.

Before leaving London, Lawrence had written to his brother Will, who was still in India, advising him to do nothing in a hurry—apparently in recognition of the fact that it was going to be a longer war than Will supposed—and mysteriously warning him, “Keep your eye on Afghanistan.” Now, from Cairo, he wrote again to Will to say that he had beenthere for six weeks, “in the office from morning to night,” trying to make sense of the news that was brought to him from all over the Ottoman Empire, and preparing “geographical essays” for general headquarters (GHQ). To the family he wrote quite a jolly letter, first to express gratitude for their sending his bicycle out to Cairo, then giving his somewhat outspoken opinions about his new colleagues, as well as revealing that he sees “a good deal” of General Maxwell, the GOC, whom he describes as “a very queer person, almost weirdly good-natured, very cheerful…. He takes the whole job as a splendid joke,” an odd description of the general in command of the entire Middle East. Of the two members of Parliament, he describes Lloyd as “very amusing,” and Herbert as “a joke, but a very nice one.” He mentions a few more odd additions to the staff, including Pиre Jaussen, an Arabic-speaking French Dominican monk from Jerusalem; and Philip Graves, the correspondent for the Times of London. Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who had lent Lawrence the money at Petra, had just arrived “on her usual winter trip to Egypt,” and invited him to dinner. In general it sounds as if Lawrence was having a very much jollier and more sociable life in Cairo than at home. The letter reads as if censorship of officers’ mail was not yet being exercised efficiently, or perhaps the Intelligence Department had some way to get around it. What Lawrence did not mention to his family was his remarkably quick jump up the promotion ladder: he had been appointed an acting staff captain less than three months after he had been commissioned as a second-lieutenant.

Lawrence’s dislike for Egypt, Cairo, and the Egyptians had not diminished, even though he seems to have settled in very fast this time. All members of the intelligence staff were quartered together at the Continental Hotel (at ten shillings a day) with a direct line to GHQ, at the Savoy Hotel, and Lawrence bicycled over to his job every morning. His army pay was Ј400 a year, so he was well off in Cairo. He saw General Maxwell frequently—the commander in chief does not appear to have been in any way a remote figure—but Lawrence’s opinions were already his own: “So far as Syria is concerned it is France & not Turkey that is theenemy,” he wrote home. This idea was to form the basis for much of what he did in 1917–1918, but it was far from British policy.

Indeed, British policy in the Middle East was hampered from the beginning both by France’s historic claim to Lebanon and Syria, the origins of which went back to the time of the Crusades and included French support for the Maronite Christians of Lebanon; and by the fact that the British government in London and the government of India in Delhi had radically different ideas about the Middle East. Kitchener had always looked to the Arabs with the thought that given British support they might one day form a dominion or a colony under British rule, creating a British “block” or area that would stretch from the western border of Egypt through much of what is now Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, and extending south in Africa to include Sudan, which he himself had conquered, and of course the Suez Canal, which would then be protected by British possessions, rather than exposed at the extreme western end. To achieve this, it would be necessary to stoke the fires of Arab nationalism and separatism, which in the view of most people burned so low as to be invisible, since “the Arabs” scarcely even recognized themselves as such, and remained divided by region, by tribe, by clan, by religious differences, and by mutual enmity. The gap between the urbanized Arabs of Beirut or Damascus and the nomads of the Arabian Desert was so great as to seem unbridgeable, and the Turks had skillfully played one group against the other for centuries.

From the vantage point of the government in India a very different view prevailed. First of all, the largest single Muslim population in the world was in India, under British rule. Any attempt to ignite an Arab nationalist uprising in the Middle East could hardly fail to inspire Muslims in India to do the same. Worse still, the sultan of Turkey, impotent figurehead though he had now become, was caliph, the commander of the faithful, the successor of Muhammad, the spiritual leader of all Muslims everywhere, and the only person entitled to proclaim a jihad, or holy war, against the infidel. The last thing the government of India wanted on its doorstep was an Arab holy war. Moreover, the government of India, ifobliged to fight the Turks, wanted to do so in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and had in mind for it a full colonial government—in short, rule from Delhi. Properly farmed, it was believed, Mesopotamia could produce grain to help India through its periodic famines, and could be policed by the Indian army. Indeed, within days of the British declaration of war against Turkey the Indian Army Expeditionary Force (which had been at sea for nearly three weeks, waiting for news of the declaration) had landed to ensure the safety of British oil installations in the Persian Gulf. Shortly afterward this force took the city of Basra, where Sir Percy Cox was installed as chief political officer, and announced that all of Mesopotamia was now under the British flag and would henceforth enjoy “the benefits of liberty and justice,” but not of course those of national independence.

Busy as he was with map work, and digesting intelligence reports into concise and useful documents for General Maxwell and Maxwell’s staff—Lawrence described himself self-deprecatingly as “bottle-washer and office boy pencil-sharpener and pen-wiper"—his view of the Middle East was inherently that of Cairo, rather than Delhi. He did not see the Arabs as “natives,” and he had no sympathy for traditional colonialism, whether British or French. He was well aware of events that were taking place in the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire, since he, Woolley, and Newcombe all worked together in one room, and ate all their meals together, so it would have been hard for them to keep secrets from each other, even had they wanted to. Since they worked for Colonel Clayton, they also had a broader knowledge than other staff officers of what was happening. Clayton not only was in charge of the army’s Intelligence Department, which reported to General Maxwell, but also ran the Egyptian civilian intelligence service, which reported to the high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, and in addition was the representative in Cairo of the sirdar and governor-general of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate. For a man with three masters—one of whom, Wingate, combined a high military position and a civil position—Clayton was a model of patience, tact, and objectivity; and unlike many “spymasters” he does not seem to have tried to keep those who worked for him out of the larger picture.