Neither Lawrence nor the men he led and served would have been useful if handled in any other way. The Bedouin could be inspired by the right leader, and they could be bribed or shamed into doing great things, but they did not obey orders or submit to threats, so the discipline of a conventional army was beyond them: Lawrence relied instead on the strength of his own personality, and on his seemingly endless supply of British gold sovereigns.

Different as they were—Allenby was huge, overbearing, and notoriously abrupt and outspoken; Lawrence was, by comparison, tiny, soft-spoken, and inclined to be tactful, enigmatic, and often indirect—the two men became, at any rate in public and in their correspondence with each other, a kind of mutual admiration society. Their relationship survived the war, the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and even the fact that Allenby, perhaps the most successful and competent British general of World War I, found himself living in Lawrence’s shadow, a supporting player in an epic where “Lawrence of Arabia” was the star.

Allenby was astute enough, from the beginning, to allow Lawrence direct access, an immense concession for a busy army commander, whom even major-generals approached warily through his chief of staff. To put this in perspective, it is as if an acting major commanding a small force of French guerrillas behind enemy lines had direct access to Eisenhower whenever he pleased in the second half of 1944. It was shrewd of Allenby to see that Lawrence would never be able to go through the normal chain of command, and also to understand, perhaps better than Lawrence himself, that Lawrence’s curiously inverted vanity and sense of being “special” could be satisfied only by going directly to the top. For a long time Lawrence was accused of not taking his own rank seriously, and that is certainly true. In later years he always talked about “Colonel Lawrence"as if that were a separate person, whose legend kept on growing, marching on indestructibly while the real Lawrence sought to hide. But the truth was that Lawrence considered himself, from the first, above such commonplace things as rank. Once, he had expressed an ambition to be a general and knighted before he was thirty; now, neither of those ambitions, though both were within his grasp, was enough to satisfy him. He had become, instead, something much more: a hero on a grand, unconventional, and glamorous scale.

On his arrival in Cairo on July 10, 1917, after the capture of Aqaba, Lawrence told Clayton, his nominal superior officer, that there was much more he could do, if Clayton “thought I had earned the right to be my own master,” a telling phrase, and produced a sketch map of his plans—ambitious enough to startle Allenby when he saw it. Lawrence proposed to use seven separate Arab “forces” to disrupt the Turkish railway system, from Homs and Hama, north of Damascus, to Maan in the south, and to threaten vital railway lines and junctions deep inside Lebanon and Palestine, throwing Turkish communications into confusion, and perhaps even seizing Damascus.

With his usual quick mind, Lawrence had guessed that Allenby’s intention was to advance from El Arish to Jerusalem, though he could not have known that David Lloyd George, on sending Allenby out to replace General Murray, had said “that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people.” Allenby was determined to give Lloyd George what he wanted, and instantly saw the advantages of using the Arabs to disrupt Turkish communications and supply lines, rather than have them try once more to take Medina, and probably fail again. He had also been concerned, not unnaturally, about advancing on Gaza and Beersheba with his right flank “in the air,” a position no competent general wants to find himself in. Despite the forbidding terrain and the lack of roads between the coastline of Palestine and the Dead Sea, an enterprising Turkish or German commander could still assemble a force large enough to strike westward against Allenby; and Lawrence was proposing to fill this vacuum with Arab irregulars, advancing north from Aqaba parallelto Allenby’s line of march. Feisal’s forces, whatever they might be—both Feisal and Lawrence were often wildly optimistic about numbers—would become Allenby’s extended right flank, freeing him to feint at Gaza, then use all his strength to advance on Beersheba and outflank the Turkish lines.

Allenby did not necessarily expect Lawrence to succeed with these ambitious plans, but so long as Lawrence and the Arabs were active on his right and cut Turkish telegraph wires, he would be content. The Turks who were engaged in patrolling or repairing the single-line railway to Medina, defending Medina and Maan against Arab raiders from the desert, would be pinned down, unable to be moved quickly to threaten his right flank. For all practical purposes in the battle to come, they might as well not exist.

Lawrence moved fast to capitalize on his newfound position. He secured Allenby’s permission to transfer his base from faraway Wejh to Aqaba—no easy task, because it involved securing Hussein’s agreement to place Feisal and his Arab forces under Allenby’s command, as well as squaring General Wingate in Khartoum, and drawing on the stores at Rabegh that had been intended for Abdulla’s use. The shifting relationships between Sharif Hussein’s sons, consistent only in their obedience to their stern father’s authority, required a constant, careful study of the Hashemite family and its moods, a subject on which Lawrence was already an expert. It also involved something he did not regret: further friction with the French, who wanted to see the Arab army tied up trying to take Medina, as opposed to seeing it in a position to advance into Syria. Indeed Colonel Brйmond and the French military mission were in Jidda for the main purpose of preventing this.

One by one, these difficulties were sorted out. Clayton wisely chose, with Lawrence’s agreement, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce to take command at Aqaba, and turn it into a secure base for the Arab army, leaving Lawrence free to go inland without worrying about supplies and support. Joyce, who had been offended by Lawrence’s unmilitary appearance and flippant manner when they had met briefly at Port Sudan in1916, had become a convert, and would be a lifelong friend and admirer. On paper, Joyce was Lawrence’s commander, but in fact he was the firmly planted anchor to Lawrence’s ambitious schemes, a broad, six-foot-tall pillar of strength, common sense, and knowledge of how to get things done by the book and—more important— despite the book, in the army.

Lawrence was sent off at once to explain matters to King Hussein. The sharif had announced his newly assumed title as king of the Hejaz late in 1916, over the repeated objections of the British, who feared the effect this would have on ibn Saud as well as on the presumably more democratically-minded Arab nationalists in Syria. Lawrence boarded HMS Dufferin, which had been placed at his disposal, and stopped for one day in Wejh. There the RFC provided an airplane to fly him 100 miles inland to Jeida, “a little palm garden,” where Feisal and Joyce were encamped. It is a mark of Lawrence’s new status that naval ships and aircraft were now his for the asking. At Jeida, comfortable under the palms, he discussed with Feisal the best way of approaching his father, and also a new factor in the Arab army. Jaafar Pasha, a Baghdadi who was a former Turkish officer, had become Feisal’s chief of staff and had also organized a number of Arab prisoners of war from the Turkish army into a uniformed group, quite separate from the Bedouin tribesmen who made up the bulk of Feisal’s forces. Jaafar’s regulars were professional soldiers, not irregulars, and while their number was still small, they would play an increasingly important role in the Arab army.