Thwarted on every other front in the war against Turkey, the British moved quickly. Abdulla had already warned the British on May 23 that the revolt was imminent, and as a result Hogarth and Storrs were already on their way to Hejaz, carrying Ј10,000 in gold sovereigns, as requested. After innumerable delays and adventures, Storrs finally met with Zeid, rather than Abdulla, and was told that the revolt had already begun—or was about to begin, Zeid was not sure—and that his father required an immediate payment of Ј70,000 in gold, delivery of a long list of military supplies and equipment, and assurance that the annual pilgrimage of Indian Muslims to Mecca—on which much of Mecca’s prosperity depended—would not be impeded by the British. Storrs noted that Zeid brought his entourage on board HMS Dufferin, including a pet gazelle “pronging playfully at strangers and eating cigarettes off the mess table.”

The sharif’s arrangements produced an overwhelming initial success—the Turkish garrison in Mecca surrendered; the Turkish force in Taif, where well-to-do Meccans went to escape the summer heat, was besieged (it did not surrender until September); and the Turkish garrison of Jidda, Mecca’s port, surrendered after being bombarded from the sea by HMS Fox. Medina, it was optimistically forecast, would fall at any moment to the forces lead by the emirs Feisal and Abdulla. After nearly two years of promises, extravagant demands, and delays, the Arab uprising seemed at last to be under way.

Lawrence, though still deskbound, was delighted. “This revolt,” he wrote home, “will be the biggest thing in the Near East since 1550.” All the same, he was limited to such roles as overseeing the printing of maps, and designing stamps for the sharif of Mecca at the request of Storrs. The stamps were a political necessity. It was obviously impossible for Hejaz to continue using Ottoman stamps, and it was important to portray the Hejaz as an actual independent Arab state, rather than a former Ottoman province. Lawrence expended considerable energy and imagination on the project, hunting up Arabic designs in mosques, overseeing the engraving and the printing, and making plans “to have flavored gum on the back, so that one may lick without unpleasantness.” The flavored gum turned out to be a mistake—Lawrence produced a flavor so tasty to the Arabs that they licked all the gum off and then couldn’t stick the stamp to the envelope—but he was able to send a few samples home for his youngest brother, Arnie, noting that they might bevaluable one day, and that “things are not going too well” in Arabia, despite the initial successes.

What was not going well was the attempt to take Medina, where the Turks had 14,000 troops, well provided with artillery and supplied by rail from Damascus, against whom the Arab tribesmen, mostly carrying antiquated rifles, could make no headway. The sharif, Lawrence noted in his letter home of October 10, “has a sense of humor,” an opinion which he would soon change, but noted “his weakness is in military operations.” Lawrence complained about the volume of his work, and the amount of interruptions he had to endure in answering telephone calls from the staff, with whom he was fighting a kind of bureaucratic guerrilla war in order to get himself transferred once and for all to the more congenial Arab Bureau. He does not mention the fact that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to Jidda in the company of Storrs. Storrs wrote in his diary, “12. X. 16. On the train from Cairo little Lawrence my super-cerebral companion.”

Just nine days later, Storrs waved good-bye to Lawrence at Rabegh, from where Lawrence was to ride into the desert for his first meeting with Feisal. “Long before we met again,” Storrs wrote later, “he had already begun to write his page, brilliant as a Persian miniature, in the History of England.”

* The Sultan Osman I had originally been ordered from Armstrong by Brazil, which found itself unable to meet the payments for construction. turkey then took over the contract. The Reshadiye was built from scratch for turkey, and included such special features as turkish-style “squat” toilets. A third battleship was also on order.

* Before declaring war an ambassador asked the foreign minister of the government to which he was accredited for the passports of his embassy staff and their families, signaling their imminent departure.

* This is odd, since later, in writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence deliberately abandoned any attempt at systematic or consistent spelling of Arabic names, informing the copy editor, “i spell my names anyhow, to show what rot systems are” (Jonathan Cape edition of 1935, p. 25). But then, as ralph Waldo emerson pointed out, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

* The famous line of Professor John Seeley, in The Expansion of England (1883).

* The book’s subtitle, “a triumph,” is bitterly sarcastic, though seldom recognized as such.

* This applied to many other agreements, including the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration.

* Both the British and the French understood that russia’s ambitions would also have to be satisfied, and would at least include sizable gains in the Caucasus, equal representation in control of the Christian holy places in Jerusalem, and the biggest prize of all: Constantinople and russian control over the exit from and entrance to the Black Sea–the supreme goal of russian foreign policy since Catherine the Great.

† Sir Mark Sykes would reemerge as front-page news in 2008. he had died of the Spanish flu in Paris, in 1919, and been buried in a sealed, lead-lined coffin. With the permission of his family, his remains were exhumed in the hope of finding viral traces of the flu that could be used as a vaccine against newer forms of flu, such as avian flu H1N1.

* This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. it was based on the assumption that–the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples–the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowledge of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.

* The future Lord Carnock, father of the author Sir harold Nicolson, diplomat, politician, prolific author, and husband of Vita Sackville-West.

* The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty–hence their support of the princely states in india until 1947, and their eagerness to place emir Feisal on the throne of iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan; both of these “monarchies” were invented overnight on the British model. ibn Saud, at least, turned himself into a king without British help.

* Kress von Kressenstein shared his command for form’s sake with a turkish general, tala Bey, and both were overseen from Damascus by Jemal Pasha, who was both the political and the military chief of the Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian portions of the ottoman empire.

† The key to building roads in the desert was to lay down wire netting, so that vehicles did not get bogged down in the sand–a huge job of physical labor that was performed for the most part by egyptians.

* Ј3 million would be about $240,000,000 today. if it was to have been paid in gold, the current value would be in the billions!

CHAPTER SEVEN

1917: “The Uncrowned King of Arabia”

After Aqaba Lawrence appeared to some a different person. He was no longer an intelligence officer observing the war from a distance; he had become a warrior, already famous and much admired. He had not only fought and won a significant victory against the Turks—in contrast to the British defeat at Gallipoli and the shame of General Townshend’s surrender at Kut—but also ridden far behind the enemy lines with a price on his head. He had discovered that his name, his impatience with routine, his unorthodox opinions about war, and even his appearance were weapons more powerful than guns, swords, and high explosives. When he thought that humility and modesty were called for, Lawrence could give an excellent performance of both. He had an Englishman’s understanding of the value of those qualities and the degree to which they mattered to other Englishmen of his class, but there was not in fact anything remotely humble or modest about him, as Allenby had instantly perceived. Allenby possessed to the full that most important of skills in a good general, handling men; and throughout the next two years he handled Lawrence brilliantly. In a metaphor that is entirely appropriate to apply to a cavalryman, Allenby rode Lawrence on the loosest of reins, giving him his head, and allowing him to pick his own way forward over difficult ground. With a few notable exceptions, he gave Lawrence goals and directives, and allowed him to reach them in his own way.