In any case, unquestioned, Lawrence and his guides continued on through an increasingly difficult and barren landscape, which gradually gave way to fine white sand that radiated the heat and the glare of the sun until he had to close his eyes against it. In the distance were fantastic rock formations and jagged mountains. They had left the roadway, such as it was, to track across country for hours, and rejoined it just as the sun began to set. Bir el Sheikh, when they reached it, proved to be nothing more than a tiny cluster of “miserable” rock huts on either side of the way, from which the smoke of cooking fires arose. Obeid dismounted and bought flour; and this was the end of the first stage of their journey.

Lawrence describes, with the eye of a good travel writer, how Obeid mixed the flour with a little water and patted and pulled it into a disk about “two inches thick, and six inches across,” which he plunged into the embers of a brushwood fire to bake, and which the three of them shared after Obeid had clapped it between his hands to knock the cinders off. Lawrence’s indifference to food was notorious, and he had nodifficulty surviving on the usual Bedouin rations of flour and dates. (It was their rare feast that made him queasy: a whole sheep—cooked with head, innards, and all—served on an enormous copper tray in a thick bed of rice moistened with hot grease.)

An hour to cook and eat their meal, an hour of rest, and they were on their way again, in pitch darkness, on fine sand so soft that Lawrence at first found the silence oppressive. Along the way, perhaps because Lawrence blended in so well with the Bedouin way of life and made none of the complaints and demands that might be expected from a British officer, Obeid had become more talkative, and even gave Lawrence a few tactful hints about how to get the best out of his camel. Obeid had already indicated to Lawrence the existence of a small village of date farmers only a few hours from Rabegh, and of another settlement farther on along a valley that would give the Turks an opportunity of flanking Feisal’s army and attacking Rabegh, or, alternatively, marching south from well to well to isolate Rabegh and attack Mecca. Neither Emir Abdulla nor Emir Ali had thought to mention this interesting feature of the topography around Rabegh, which Lawrence instantly realized made the idea of placing a British brigade there both risky and pointless. Hitherto, whenever Sharif Hussein had been alarmed by signs of a Turkish advance, he had requested the immediate dispatch of a brigade, while the British had hesitated, unwilling to commit troops when so many were needed elsewhere; but whenever the British, alarmed by events in the Hejaz, had offered a brigade, the sharif had always turned it down at the last minute, saying that his people would object to the presence of Christian soldiers. Now it was clear to Lawrence that placing a British brigade in Rabegh would be useless, even in the unlikely event that General Wingate agreed to provide one, and at the same time, Sharif Hussein agreed to accept it.

Adding to Lawrence’s vast store of knowledge was his long-standing passion for military history, tactics, and strategy. Castles had fascinated him since his childhood, and as a boy he had visited, sketched, and measured the remains of most of the great castles in Britain and France,traveling phenomenal distances by bicycle. As an undergraduate at Oxford he visited the great crusader castles of the Near East; indeed his thesis at Oxford, which won him a “first"—so brilliant a success that his tutor at Jesus College gave a lavish “dinner to the examiners to celebrate it"—was The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the End of the XIIth Century, with maps, architectural plans, and photographs by himself (it would eventually be published as a book).

Lawrence never did things by half. His interest in medieval fortifications and armor led him naturally to a broader study of military thinking. His friend and biographer in later life, the distinguished British military historian and philosopher of war B. H. Liddell Hart, would praise Lawrence’s “astonishingly wide” reading of military texts. That reading began when Lawrence was only fifteen, with what he himself dismissed as such “schoolboy stuff” as “Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Coxe’s Marlborough, Mahan’s Influence of Sea-Power on History, Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson” He went on to Procopius and Vegetius, and from there to the Germans: Clausewitz, Moltke, Freiherr von der Goltz; then, working backward, to Jomini and Napoleon. He “browsed” his way, as he put it, through all thirty-two volumes of Napoleon’s correspondence, then moved on to the earlier French writers on war: Bourcet (of whose book there was said to be only one copy in England, in the War Office library), and de Saxe.

Liddell Hart would compare Lawrence to Napoleon* (favorably), though Lawrence himself never made such a claim. In part this was because his admiration for Napoleon as a general would eventually be eclipsed by his admiration for Marshal Maurice de Saxe, the great eighteenth-century French general (though he was in fact of German and Polish descent), and author of a remarkable work on the art of war, Mes Rкveries, which was to have a great effect on Lawrence (and later, in World War II, on Field Marshal Montgomery).

The generals in Cairo may be forgiven for not noticing that they had a budding military genius in their midst in the person of Temporary Second-Lieutenant and Acting Staff Captain T. E. Lawrence. But even before the war he had begun quite consciously to develop as a kind of sideline to archaeology and literature what Napoleon called le coup d’oeil de gйnie, the rare and elusive “quick glance of genius” that enables a great commander to see at once, on a map or from the landscape in front of him, the point at which an enemy is weakest, and where an attack will throw the enemy off balance. Years of studying castles had given Lawrence an instinctive feel for topography—it was no accident that he had entered the army through the back door as a mapmaker—and a real gift for visualizing how geographical features determine the movement of armed forces, and inexorably govern both attack and defense.

Generals Murray and Wingate, as well as the emirs Abdulla and Ali, might not appreciate how Obeid’s chance remark about date palm villages east of Rabegh brought Lawrence to the conclusion that a British brigade would be “quite useless there to save Mecca from the Turks,” but Lawrence understood it instantly. His ability to think in three dimensions, his keen eye for even the smallest details of the landscape, and his remarkable visual memory were all formidable assets for a soldier, though as yet untested in battle. Freud’s famous comment that “biology is destiny” has its equivalent in military terms—geography determines strategy; it is the inescapable foundation of the whole art of war. Lawrence was already working out, by a process of rational observation, a new way of thinking about how the Arabs might win their war against the Turks—indeed a new way of thinking about war altogether.

His heirs would include such unusual British officers as Major-General Orde Wingate, who would put Lawrence’s ideas to use in the Sudan, Palestine, and Abyssinia between the wars, and in Burma during World War II; and Colonel David Stirling, a leader of the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa in World War II. He also influenced several even more successful, unconventional, and revolutionary soldiers, including Mao Zedong in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Fidel

Castro in Cuba, and in our day both sides in conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lawrence is now studied with just as much attention by those trying to put down a guerrilla insurgency as by those trying to lead one. The roadside bomb, the unexpected attacks by relatively small numbers of fighters who strike hard, then vanish back into the trackless wastes of the desert (or the jungle, or the slums), the use of high explosives as a political statement, the ability of a guerrilla leader to turn his army’s weaknesses into strength—these are all legacies from Lawrence’s study of warfare as a young man.