Surrendering an Anglo-Indian army to the Turks was thought to be an unacceptable humiliation, particularly by the government of India, which feared the loss in native eyes of British prestige. The situation was made worse because the majority of Townshend’s unfortunate troops were Indian and there were no illusions about what would become of the garrison once they were force-marched into Turkish prisoner-of-war camps. Townshend, in a fit of desperation, proposed that he be authorized to offer the Turkish commander Ј1 million in gold and the surrender of his forty guns in exchange for letting him and his troops “go free on parole.” Surprisingly, though this suggestion infuriated Sir Percy Cox and British senior officers in Basra and Delhi, it found favor with Kitchener, who feared the loss of British prestige throughout Asia if Townshend surrendered. Townshend, as it turned out, perhaps through wishful thinking, had overrated the willingness of Khalil Pasha to negotiate; and what Kitchener had in mind was a two-pronged approach, which involved stirring up Arab desertion and resistance within the Turkish army to put more pressure on the Ottoman government to offer reasonable terms. Since neither Cox nor anybody else in Basra wanted anything to do with either part of the scheme, somebody else was needed to carry it out.

The choice of Aubrey Herbert—Sir Mark Sykes’s friend, a fellow member of Parliament, and a member of the Arab Bureau in Cairo—was a natural one. Herbert was a Turcophile, spoke Turkish, and knew most of the Turkish leaders personally; also, he was urbane, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, the ideal person to offer Khalil Pasha what was, in effect, a Ј1 million bribe. Lawrence was chosen to accompany Herbert because he spoke Arabic. His chief role was to make contact with Arab nationalist officers in the Turkish army who might join with Arab nationalist figures in Basra and Baghdad to start a revolt—or at least shake Khalil’s confidence in his Arab troops. Since this was exactly what Lawrence had done when he provided Grand Duke Nicholas with the names of dissident Arab officers before the Russian attack on Erzurum, it was no doubt hoped that he could perform the same trick twice. The original idea had been to send a senior Arab officer on parole in Cairo to cross the lines and open negotiations with Khalil Pasha, but Cox firmly squashed this, with the result that it was left to Lawrence to make his way up the Tigris on a steamer, a journey of six days, followed soon afterward by Herbert. Lawrence arrived to undergo a difficult interview with the commander of the relief forces, General Sir Percy Lake, KCB, KCMG, and then almost immediately succumbed to a fever, probably a recurrence of his malaria, made worse by the marshy, humid, sweltering air.

During Lawrence’s illness, the last attempt to relieve Kut failed, as did an attempt on April 24 to breach the Turkish blockade of the Tigris with a river steamer loaded with supplies. By this time, Townshend had opened negotiations with Khalil Pasha for the surrender of his force. He had been hoping that General Lake would do the negotiating for him—the idea of offering Khalil Ј1 million in gold to let Townshend’s forces go was a hot potato, which neither general wanted to touch; but in the end it was left to Townshend, who, in Aubrey Herbert’s words, “fears he is going to be blamed whatever happens,” a fear which was fully justified. Although Khalil was “extremely nice,” as Townshend put it, he proved to be a difficult, wily, and cautious negotiator, so Townshend, perhaps hoping, if nothing else, to spread the blame, requested a safe-conduct for three British officers—Colonel W. H. Beach (the head of Indian army intelligence in Basra); Captain Aubrey Herbert, MP; and Captain T. E. Lawrence—to join him in Kut as his “delegates” in the negotiations. By April 28 Townshend had offered Khalil Ј1 million, and Khalil had courteously declined it, under orders from his uncle Enver Pasha in Constantinople, who saw here an opportunity for a propaganda coup even more rewarding than the money. Townshend then sought permission to raise the offerto Ј2 million. On April 29, having failed to materially improve any of Khalil’s terms, Townshend destroyed his guns (thereby losing his last bargaining chip) and finally surrendered. By that time Beach, Herbert, and Lawrence were already on their way upstream for their meeting with Khalil, which was now pointless. As it turned out, Herbert’s command of Turkish and Lawrence’s command of Arabic proved unnecessary, since the conversation took place in French, but it produced no results, even when Colonel Beach raised the offer to Ј3 million.* Lawrence described the colonel in a letter home as “about 32 or 33, very keen & energetic but not clever or intelligent I thought.” Lawrence complained that when he arrived back he would “be nailed within that office at Cairo,” again, and asked his parents to have a new pair of brown shoes made for him, and to send his copy of Aristophanes—a sign that he was still unaware of how much his life was about to change.

Lawrence was sickened by conditions around Kut—it combined all the horrors of trench warfare on the western front with humid, intense heat, unburied bodies, and dense clouds of biting insects—and by the sheer futility of what he was doing there. Townshend’s troops were force-marched across the desert to indescribably brutal prisoner-of-war camps, preyed on by raiding Arabs along the way. Nearly three-quarters of the British troops and half of the Indian troops would be worked or starved to death in captivity, whereas Townshend himself was held in luxurious quarters in a villa on the island of Malki.

In the early summer of 1916, it seemed, in fact, that the British effort in the Middle East was an abject failure. Despite the prevailing contempt for the Turks, and the many glaring deficiencies of their army and government, de Robeck’s attempt to attack Constantinople by sea had failed, the British landing at Gallipoli had failed, and the British attack on Baghdad had ended in a humiliating debacle, as had every attempt to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza. Ramshackle though the Ottoman Empire might be, it had successfully resisted every British attempt to defeat it—only the Russians, whose empire was hardly less ramshackle than that of the Turks, had put a dent in it so far.

Lawrence returned from Basra raging against the inefficiencies of the Anglo-Indian army and administration in Basra, and spent his time on the ship writing a long report criticizing everything from the quality of the lithograph stones used in printing maps to the method of unloading supplies on the docks at Basra. Indeed, the missive was so vitriolic that General Murray’s staff insisted on toning it down before it was shown to him, which was probably just as well for Lawrence. The reorganization of the intelligence departments in Cairo was in full swing, and Lawrence found himself answering to three different departments again, neither in the Arab Bureau nor altogether out of it, and at odds with the staff and the demands of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force intelligence department, toward whom he took an increasingly haughty and insulting tone.

On June 5, two events of great importance occurred. One, which was front-page news all over the world, was the death of Field Marshal the Earl Kitchener, who was traveling to Russia on board the armored cruiser HMS Hampshire when it struck a German mine and went down in the North Sea, drowning Kitchener, his staff, and most of the crew. The other was the outbreak, at long last, of the Arab Revolt. Informed that a force of nearly 4,000 Turkish soldiers accompanied by “a German field mission led by Baron Othmar von Stotzingen” was going to march through the Hejaz to reinforce the Turkish force in Yemen, and shocked by the execution in Beirut and Damascus of twenty-one Arab nationalists, many of them known to Hussein and his sons, Sharif Hussein drew the conclusion that the Ottoman government intended to overthrow and replace him. The sharif himself fired the opening shot of the revolt, with a rifle, through a window in his palace, aimed at the nearby Turkish headquarters.