It is a measure of the British government’s relief that Sykes and Picot had achieved an agreement of any kind that the document was approved swiftly and without any particular difficulty, and Sykes was sent off to join Picot in Petrograd and secure the approval of the Russians. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Dmitriyevich Sazonov, showed very littleinterest in the division of Arab-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire, but insisted that Russia must have possession of Constantinople; must participate in the administration of Palestine, where there were ancient and important Russian Orthodox monasteries and privileges; and must receive a large chunk of the Turkish areas in the Caucasus. It seems to have been Sazonov who gave Sykes the notion that the Zionists might have something to say about Palestine, though since the czar was fiercely anti-Semitic, Sazonov may have been warning against this rather than recommending it. In any event the idea was to germinate in Sykes’s mind—he was always, as Lawrence described him, “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements.” The notion was coupled with Sykes’s sympathy for the underdog and his freedom from racial prejudice, and he soon encouraged a new and hitherto unexpected British intervention into the division of the Turkish empire, which would reemerge in the form of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

A dawning concern that the Sykes-Picot agreement might not meet with approval outside France, Britain, and Russia led to the decision not to show it to Sir Henry McMahon for his comments before it was approved on January 5, 1916, or even afterward. It was placed in the Pandora’s box of the Allies’ secret agreements, and would not emerge until after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when Lenin and Trotsky decided to publish in Izvestia and Pravda all the secret treaties to which the czarist government had been a party. Lawrence would claim in 1918, in Damascus, that he knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot agreement, but that is certainly untrue. Clayton knew about it, and the intelligence services Clayton headed in Cairo were run more in the spirit of an Oxford Senior Common Room than a secret government department. Keeping the actual text of the agreement from Cairo was elementary prudence, preserving what would now be called deniability—it would of course be easier for all those in Cairo to deny that they knew the contents if they hadn’t seen it. Nor was Mark Sykes much good at keeping secrets—particularly when he thought he had brought off a diplomatic coup. Besides, Lawrencewould later claim to have briefed Feisal on its contents. The truth seems to be that the general terms of the agreement were common knowledge by then. Those among the British who disagreed with it consoled themselves with the thought that it would be renegotiated, modified, or ignored once the Allies sat down to discuss the peace; but this consolation failed to take into account that the French, in their irritating, precise way, regarded every word of it as binding.

Lawrence’s own view of the matter varied according to his mood. He did not take Sykes altogether seriously, and on the subjects of the Middle East and the Arabs’ future he was inclined to regard Sykes as a lightweight. When he was exhausted by the physical and psychological stress of warfare in the desert, or by the endless difficulties of keeping the Bedouin together, he tormented himself on the subject, as in his note to Clayton from Wadi Sirhan: “I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way…. We are calling on them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.” Of course Lawrence had a gift for self-dramatization, together with a need for self-punishment, but there is no doubt that this cri de coeur was genuine and would form the basis for many of the major decisions he made about his life after the war’s end. No child of Sarah’s could be free from a deep sense of guilt and personal responsibility, or forgive himself for obeying an order to lie about what he knew to be true. No matter how much he wanted to break free from her fierce religious beliefs, Lawrence could not—they were implanted too deeply in him to eradicate.

In his lighter moments, when things were going well, he could console himself, like many of his colleagues, with the thought that something was better than nothing—the Arabs would get one or more states, and would be better off in any case than they were under Turkish domination and misrule—but even this compromise was complicated by his determination to get the Arabs what he had promised them despite the Sykes-Picot agreement. Lawrence knew about McMahon and Hussein’s correspondence, and noted a significant loophole in the Sykes-Picot agreement: it could be argued that if the Arabs themselves seized Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs before the Allied forces, they might keep these cities under some form of Arab suzerainty, despite the French claim on Syria.

It became the idйe fixe behind Lawrence’s strategy, a secret that he withheld from all the British civil and military authorities, who would instantly have discouraged him. He, personally, would get Feisal and the Arabs to Damascus before the British or the French, and declare an independent Arab Syria before he could be stopped. Once that was done, he thought, the French would have to back down in the face of public opinion in Britain and the United States. This was the straw he clutched at, throughout 1917 and 1918.

Lawrence was kept busy with his intelligence duties; this was probably just as well, for he was informed in October 1915 that his brother Will, whom he had just missed seeing, had been listed as missing and presumed killed only a week after reaching the western front as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps. Lawrence wrote to his friend Leeds, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: “I have not written to you for ever so long…. It’s partly being so busy here, that one’s thoughts are all on the jobs one is doing, and one grudges doing anything else … and partly because I’m rather low because first one and now another of my brothers has been killed…. I rather dread Oxford and what it may be like if one comes back. Also, they were both younger than I am, and it doesn’t seem right somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo.”

As 1916 began, there was nothing to suggest that Lawrence would ever get into combat. Work in Cairo was complicated by the fact that there were now three armies to keep informed: the former Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray, which had been evacuated from Gallipoli; the British “Force in Egypt,” commanded by General Sir John Maxwell, which was responsible for defending the Suez Canal; and the Egyptian army, of which General Sir Reginald Wingate was the sirdar. Lawrence complained that there were at least 108 generals in Cairo, and while that may have beenan exaggeration, there were certainly enough generals, together with their staffs, to make Lawrence remark to Leeds, “I’m fed up, and fed up, and fed up:—and yet we have to go on doing it, and indeed we take on new jobs every day.” His daily intelligence bulletins would soon be converted into the famous Arab Bulletin, the brainchild of Hogarth, who came out to Cairo in the uniform of a temporary lieutenant-commander of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve to oversee intelligence matters, and brought with him Gertrude Bell, whose knowledge of the Arab tribes would prove invaluable. The Arab Bulletin was a secret news sheet that quickly grew into a regularly published magazine, of which only twenty-one copies of each issue were initially printed, and which contained the latest information on the Turkish army, as well all the news from inside the Ottoman Empire that could be gleaned from agents and from Turkish prisoners of war. Lawrence was working at least thirteen hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to his previous duties, he was responsible for collecting information about each of the eighty or so divisions of the Turkish army. The only one of them that was “really settled,” he joked to Leeds (ignoring the censor), “the one we ‘defeat’ from time to time on the canal, is located in the Caucasus by the Russians, at Pardima by the Athens people, in Adrianople by Bulgaria, at Midia by Roumania, and in Bagdad by India. The locations of the other thirty-nine regular, and fourty reserve divisions are less certain.” Lawrence was thus in regular touch with the intelligence services of all the Allied nations, and indeed was sent to Athens on a quick trip to help straighten out matters there. As for the Russians, who were fighting the better part of the Turkish regular army in the Caucasus, Lawrence apparently reached out on his own, on the basis of information obtained from the interrogation of the Arab deserter from the Turkish forces, al-Faruqi, “to put the Grand Duke Nicholas in touch with ce rtain disaffected [Turkish] officers in Erzurum,” thus making possible the successful Russian assault on this important fortress town in February 1916.