Warfare and politics, of course, are a different matter; in both, duplicity is a weapon, and Lawrence used it expertly. During the war Lawrence was obliged to conceal from his Arab friends the ambitions of France and Britain in the territory the Arabs supposed themselves to be fighting for, as well as to conceal from his British superiors the problems of the Arab army. He was not Sarah’s son for nothing, however—tactics and politics apart, in the things that mattered most to him he always told the truth, however painful for others or himself.

No sooner was Lawrence back at Aqaba—which was rapidly being transformed into an armed base, with a landing strip for the RFC and a stone jetty built by British sailors for unloading supplies—than a letter from Sir Mark Sykes brought alarming hints that the British government was secretly negotiating with the Ottoman government in the hope of Turkey’s accepting a negotiated peace. It was not only Auda who was putting out feelers to the Turks. In the absence of a significant British victory, a negotiated peace with Turkey was a constant temptation to a wily politician like Lloyd George. From the British point of view, it would have freed large numbers of troops in the Middle East to reinforce the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the western front in France for the one big attack that might perhaps bring the war to an end in 1917; and it would no doubt have negated all British promises to the Arabs. From the Turks’ point of view, it would have enabled them to get out of the war with the minimum of loss to their empire, and to reexert Turkish hegemony over Arabs, Kurds, Christians, and Jews, and whatever remained of the Armenian population after the genocide. ^*Sykes, ever the enthusiast, claimedto have returned to London and put an end to this attempt by facing down Lloyd George—a delusion, given the prime minister’s habit of making promises he had no intention of keeping. Sykes was just as overconfident of his ability to handle Lloyd George as he was of his ability to handle Picot and King Hussein. As usual, Sykes was bubbling over with contradictory ideas: Lawrence should be given a knighthood for what he had accomplished so far, and must persuade the Arabs that they would be better off in the end under ten years of British rule, or “tutelage,” as Sykes put it gracefully, before achieving independence. The French must be made to see that French colonial rule over the Arabs was out of the question—he would go to Paris himself and “slam” this to Picot. The British must stick together loyally with the French in the Middle East, and not let the Arabs divide them along the lines of “You very good man, him very bad man,” in Sykes’s cheery phrase, for despite his sympathy for every racial and ethnic group, there was still an element of the pukka sahib in him, which he was unable to altogether suppress.

Middle Eastern diplomacy: Sir Mark Sykes’s cartoon of himself negotiating with Sharif Hussein in Jidda.

There were many reasons for these well-meant contradictions on the part of the imaginative and mercurial Sykes. The bloody stalemate on the western front showed no sign of ending; the abdication of the czar in February 1917 had led to a precarious stalemate on the eastern front as Kerensky’s government sought to keep Russia in the war, while the Russian people yearned increasingly for peace. The United States had been drawn into the war in April 1917 by the folly of Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine attacks in the Atlantic; and the Americans’ entry had brought with it Woodrow Wilson’s stern warning against further colonial acquisitions by the European powers, and had enshrined the principles of “self-determination” and democracy as the basis for any postwar settlement. The Sykes-Picot agreement seemed to be exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that Wilson was warning against, and it no longer looked to the British, or even to Sykes himself, like an attractive solution to the problems of the Middle East.

Early in September Lawrence wrote a long letter to Sykes from Aqaba, objecting to the continuation of a policy that would, in effect, marginalizethe Arabs, and anticipating in detail the effect the Balfour Declaration would have on King Hussein and Feisal. The letter is particularly interesting because it is couched in the form of a request to know exactly what he should tell Feisal about every point Sykes raises, and among other things predicts accurately how bitterly opposed the Arabs would be to Zionist attempts to purchase large amounts of land in Palestine, whatever efforts were made to sweeten the pill. Clayton, who was nobody’s fool, in effect “spiked” Lawrence’s letter, and instead wrote back to Lawrence that the Sykes-Picot agreement was as good as dead, so he (and Feisal) should stop worrying about it.

Lawrence’s concerns on the subject cannot have been stilled by the arrival of a French contingent at Aqaba, under the command of Captain Rosario Pisani, an experienced French colonial officer. The French detachment was dwarfed by the 800 uniformed Arab soldiers under Jaafar, by the tribesmen who were coming in daily to join Feisal’s forces, and by the British technicians, instructors, and supply personnel, but Pisani’s presence and the French tricolor were a daily reminder that France’s claims in the Middle East were not about to go away as easily as Clayton predicted.

It is in this light that one must consider the ambitious plans Lawrence made to demonstrate the fighting power of the Bedouin—he could not determine British policy, but he could perhaps undermine it by demonstrating just how effective the Arabs could be in the field. By their achievements he would enforce their title to the lands that they claimed—and that, at least in his own mind, he claimed for them. The sooner they moved north, into Syria, the better.

But “Syria” was, of course, merely “a geographical expression,” as Metternich famously described Italy, and no two people agreed on what it was, or should be. Lawrence, for the moment stuck at Feisal’s “base camp,” now that Feisal had moved his headquarters to Aqaba, gave some serious thought to what lay ahead, and carefully studied the map. He had spent the better part of the war so far drawing up British army maps, and nobody was better at that most basic skill of warfare, the ability to look ata map and visualize what it means in terms of tactics, strategy, and lines of communication. He concluded that the war in the Hejaz had been won by the move to Wejh; that the threat to Mecca was over; and that the railway line to Medina should be cut just often enough to keep the Turks fully occupied repairing and defending it, but never so completely as to tempt them to abandon Medina, where they were, in effect, bottled up, half starved and reduced to eating their mules and camels, which might have carried them to Rabegh or Mecca. This was a program he could continue, and eventually delegate to others, as he moved north toward Maan, providing Allenby with the all-important flank on the right as he advanced on Jerusalem. At the same time, Lawrence needed to expand his contacts with anti-Turkish elements in Syria; the Hejaz was empty space, crossed only by the nomadic Bedouin, but as Feisal’s army moved north it would be entering areas that were cultivated, where peasants worked the land and clung to their villages, and relied on roads, however primitive, to sell their produce. These Arabs depended on some form of order, and recognized that in their region, unlike the Hejaz, not everyone was automatically, even unthinkingly, Muslim.

Syria held ancient and long-established communities of Christians—Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Arab Christians—and of Druses, Circassians, Kurds, Jews, Shia and Sunni Arabs, and many smaller, dissenting Arabic sects, as well as Algerian refugees who had fled from the violent French suppression of Abd el Kader’s uprising in the mid-nineteenth century. While it was not exactly a melting pot so much as a mosaic of different groups, each with a unique ancient history of martyrdom, special privileges, and animosity toward neighbors in the next village or town, it was very unlike the Hejaz. Many of these Syrian communities—perhaps most of them—were unlikely to greet with enthusiasm the arrival of rapacious armed nomads led by a Meccan sharif.