It may or may not be true that the British acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind,"* but certainly their policy for the Middle East was improvised in haste and as something of an afterthought, by men who were overwhelmed by the sheer size and ferocity of the war only three months after it had begun. However, when Lawrence arrived in Cairo, British policy, at any rate on the surface, appeared to coincide with his own view, except for the intrusion of the Indian army and government into Mesopotamia, which Lawrence opposed from the start. He plunged into his duties in Cairo with enormous enthusiasm—and daily expandedthem in every direction. He was convinced that British policy would lead to the creation of an independent Arab state, one that would, of course, include “his” Arabs, Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi among them, and would eventually include Syria, where he had spent the four best years of his life.

For a junior staff officer, he seems to have had no hesitation in writing long, opinionated reports on strategy. No sooner was he settled into the Continental Hotel than he prepared an essay on the advantages of seizing the port of Alexandretta (now Iskenderun). The attraction of the scheme was that it could be carried out, in Lawrence’s opinion, with a relatively limited number of troops, would provide the Royal Navy with a major deepwater harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, and would at one stroke cut Turkey off from its empire in the south and bring British troops directly into Syria, instead of having the British fight their way north over the hilly and easily defended territory from Gaza to Jersualem. Kitchener, whether encouraged by Lawrence or not, took a similar point of view, but the Alexandretta scheme was doomed from the start. The French distrusted any move that would bring British troops into Syria, which France intended to have as its share of the Turkish empire, along with Lebanon; also, there was a competing plan, hatched in part by Churchill, to use the fleet to break through the Dardanelles, threaten Constantinople, and open up the Black Sea to Allied shipping.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1915, Lawrence energetically pushed the Alexandretta scheme, apparently without anybody in Cairo or London questioning why an obscure temporary second-lieutenant was dabbling in grand strategy. He went on to write a long, persuasive, closely reasoned report on Syrian politics, which was once again read at the highest levels, where it seemed to dovetail with Kitchener’s opinions. Lawrence’s impressive knowledge of Syrian secret political societies (any political discussion that involved opposition to Turkish rule had to be, by definition, secret), and of the desires of the very different peoples who lived in Syria, was well-informed, realistic, and compelling, as was his conclusion that a functional Arab state would have to include Damascusand Aleppo, and if possible the littoral area and ports of Lebanon, under an administration flexible enough to include desert dwellers and city dwellers as well as Maronite Christians. He doubted that there was any such thing as Syrian “national feeling,” but thought that the binding force of a Syrian state would be the Arabic language, and foresaw the possibility that Lebanon might need to be treated separately because of its large Christian minority. Palestine, he concluded sensibly, would present a wholly different set of problems. Anybody reading these documents would have to conclude that Lawrence’s four years at Carchemish and his travels throughout Syria and Lebanon had given him an extraordinary knowledge both of the Arabs’ hopes and of the reality (and complexity) of the situation in the Arab-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire.

In February, the Turks carried out their long-awaited attack on the Suez Canal, but it failed, since they had counted on an Egyptian uprising, which was not forthcoming. This was the attack that prevented Lawrence from meeting his brother Will. In March the Franco-British naval assault on the Dardanelles took place; it failed when six of the eighteen battleships engaged were either seriously damaged or sunk by mines, so that the hesitant naval commander, Admiral de Robeck—who had replaced the even less bold Admiral Carden at the last moment, when Carden had a collapse attributed to stress—decided to break off the attack. Many people—first and foremost Winston Churchill—have since argued that if de Robeck had not given in to his fears he could have pushed on to Constantinople, and that Turkey might have collapsed with an Allied fleet anchored off the Golden Horn. Instead, the result was that British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops were landed on Gallipoli in April, to take the Turkish forts and allow the strait to be swept clear of mines—an attempt that dragged on until December 1915 and cost the Allies nearly 150,000 casualties, including more than 44,000 killed. The failure at Gallipoli caused the Turkish attitude toward the Allies to harden, and led to the genocide of the Armenians, since they represented the largest Christian population in the Ottoman Empire. It also resulted in the final shelving of the Alexandretta scheme, for which there werenow neither sufficient troops nor sufficient shipping. Other results included a weakening of Kitchener’s position as Britain’s warlord, a setback to Winston Churchill’s career (Gallipoli would raise questions about his judgment until May 1940), and Lawrence’s growing conviction that Turkey would somehow have to be attacked on the periphery, rather than frontally.

In May came news of his brother Frank’s death. Frank had been killed while leading his men forward “preparatory to the assault,” as his company commander put it in a letter to Frank’s parents, adding, in a note typical of the futility of trench warfare on the western front, “The assault I regret to say was unsuccessful.” Lawrence’s letters home after he received the news of Frank’s death are odd. Writing to his father, he regretted that the family had felt any need to go into mourning: “I cannot see any cause at all—in any case to die for one’s country is a sort of privilege.” To his mother he wrote, “You will never understand any of us after we are grown up a little. Don’t you ever feel that we love you without our telling you so?” He ended: “I didn’t say good-bye to Frank because he would rather I didn’t, & I knew there was little chance of my seeing him again; in which case we were better without a parting.” The letter to his mother makes it clear that even over a distance of thousands of miles, the old conflict between them was continuing undiminished. Clearly, despite the pain of Frank’s death, his mother was still anxious to be reassured that her sons loved her, and Lawrence was still determined not to say so. His disapproval of the fact that the family was mourning Frank and his slightly defensive tone at not having been able to say good-bye are typical of Lawrence’s lifelong effort to cut himself off from just such emotions—a kind of self-imposed moral stoicism, and a horror of any kind of emotional display. “You know men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, & a thing to be forgotten until after it comes,” he writes to his mother; this is neither consoling nor necessarily true. It is exactly the kind of romantic bunk about war that Lawrence himself was to dismiss in some of the more brutally realistic passages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Some allowance must be made of course for the patriotic feeling and thewillingness to endure pain and death that separate Lawrence’s generation from those that followed it. These traits are exactly why Rupert Brooke’s romantic war poems seem so much harder to understand or sympathize with than the bitter, angry war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. Even so, Lawrence’s letters to his father and mother after Frank’s death seem harsh, and full of what we would now think of as the false nobility of war—putting a noble face on a meaningless slaughter. Frank’s own letters home are full of similar sentiments: “If I do die, I hope to die with colours flying.” This kind of high-minded sentiment about the war was shared by millions of people, including the soldiers themselves, although by 1917 it was wearing thin for most of the troops, as bitter postwar books like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We demonstrate. Lawrence, who would become a friend and admirer of both authors, would in the course of time proceed through the same change of heart as they did; hence the savagery, the nihilism, and the sense of personal emptiness that run through Seven Pillars of Wisdom.* Then, too, in May 1915, though Lawrence was in uniform, he was not fighting. However determined he may have been to be knighted and a general before he reached the age of thirty—he still had four years in which to accomplish these ambitions—he had not as yet made the first step toward active soldiering, and was beginning to feel a certain uneasy guilt. “Out here we do nothing,” he complained to his mother. “But I don’t think we are going to have to wait much longer.” This was probably not a prediction she wanted to receive with the death of one son on her mind; nor was it accurate, since almost eighteen months would pass before Lawrence was in action.