Lawrence wrote about the attack on the train at Mudawara in a very different spirit to his old friend Leeds at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with whom he had no need to posture as a hero from Boy’s Own:“I hope when this nightmare ends that I will wake up and become alive again. This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them, and know you have done hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can …”

Many of those who have written about Lawrence have felt the need to decide between these two very different ways of looking at warfare, and come to some conclusion about which one represents the authentic Lawrence: the self-congratulatory but faintly self-mocking heroic mode, unshocked by bloodshed; or the bitterly self-critical mode, with its deep sense of guilt about his own efficiency as a killer, and his fear that he has crossed a moral line and can never recross it to return to normal life. Of course allowance must be made for the fact that Lawrence, perhaps more than most people, altered the style of his letters to suit the recipient—indeed, even his most casual letters are artfully written to please; thus the tone of his letters to Bernard Shaw is radically different from that of his letters to Charlotte Shaw, for example. Then too, Lawrence had an eerie ability to adopt or project the appropriate version of himself for different people: thus he presented himself to Colonel Stirling, or to General Allenby, and indeed to most professional soldiers of whatever rank, as a daring and efficient soldier untroubled by the inevitable horrors of war, with the traditional British stiff upper lip of their class. To the more sensitive Storrs, he presented himself as a much more reflective and intellectual figure, a reluctant warrior. Later, to admirers such as the Shaws, Robert Graves, or Siegfried Sassoon, he emphasized his guilt and suffering; and to hardheaded political realists such as Winston Churchill, he stressed his own version of hardheaded political realism. Lawrence, like an experienced seducer, had a different persona for everyone whose affection or admiration he wished to conquer (toward those whom he did not wish to conquer he could be downright rude), and yet no persona of his was false—they all coexisted within him, and fought for dominance. Hence the confusion of most professional soldiers who had known and admired him during the war, such as Colonel A. P. Wavell (later Field Marshal the Earl Wavell, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, PC), at the many controversies surrounding Lawrence after the war, and indeed after his death, as well as the very different portraits of Lawrence drawn in the early biographies of him by authors who knew him well, and to whose books he contributed. Liddell Hart, Lowell Thomas, and Robert Graves might as well have been writing about three completely different people, Liddell Hart presenting the reader with a military genius, Thomas presenting a flamboyant and romantic scholar-hero, and Graves presenting a heroic adventurer in the tradition of Burton and Gordon.

Lawrence wrote of himself, “He who gives himself to the possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, selling himself to a brute,” a harshly self-depreciatory comment on his service among the Arabs; but he who alters his personality at will to appeal to everybody from illiterate Bedouin tribesmen to Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau, or from RAF aircraftmen to Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO, is surely no better off. Lawrence’s chameleonlike ability to present different aspects of himself to different people has, over the years, led to confusion about who he was at the core and what he accomplished, and indeed created a whole anti-Lawrence school of history and biography, which is by no means confined to the Middle East, where his role in the Arab Revolt is consistently diminished in importance, for obvious reasons. But as those who knew him best, particularly his surviving brothers, constantly pointed out, Lawrence himself in fact changed very little, if at all, from his Oxford years to his years of fame, and remained recognizablythe same person. Indeed in his letters to Hogarth there is never a hint of affectation: the tone is consistent from Lawrence’s early forays to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with potsherds to Hogarth’s death in 1927, and in his letters to other people about Hogarth afterward. Here, if anywhere, is the real Lawrence—here and in his letters to his family, his correspondence with Charlotte Shaw, and much of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The successful attack on the train at Mudawara led Lawrence to plan a series of attacks on the Turkish railway, cutting it often, and just badly enough to keep the Turks’ attention focused on it, but never so badly or for so long that they might be tempted to give up their hold on Medina. Some of these attacks he carried out personally—using high explosives to damage the railway became something between an obsession and a hobby for Lawrence in the autumn of 1917—but increasingly the Arabs, taught by British instructors, could do much of this demolition work themselves, though it did not give them the pleasure, or the profit, of looting trains. Lawrence, who had eagerly absorbed everything that Major Garland, the demolitions expert, had taught him, encouraged them to create “tulips,” using small amounts of explosive to blow up the rails, which then twisted in the air in a tulip shape. He also urged them to concentrate on blowing up the curved tracks, since these were in short supply and gave the Turks more trouble to replace. The Arab raiding parties could blow up miles of undefended track in desolate areas of the desert, keeping Turkish repair crews busy, and occasionally picking off a few soldiers when they came to repair the track.

In the meantime, Allenby was drawing up his plans, determined to succeed where generals Maxwell and Murray had failed. He replaced the staff with men of his own, bringing his own chief of staff over from France, and adding to it Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, an immensely tall, thin Coldstreamer, who was Lawrence’s kind of soldier—a banker, a poet, and a Greek scholar, with a surprising gift for unconventional tactics, given his conventional appearance. At first, he and Lawrence did not see eye to eye—"Dawnay,” Lawrence remarked, “was a cold shy mind,gazing on our efforts with a bleak eye, always thinking, thinking"—but each man came to appreciate the other’s special skills, and to overlook the contrast between Dawnay’s perfect military appearance and Lawrence’s habit of appearing out of nowhere barefoot and in flowing white robes.

A general who had made his name carrying out frontal attacks against the Germans on the western front, in the style approved and demanded by General Sir Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the BEF, Allenby nevertheless decided not to repeat the frontal attacks against Gaza that had failed under Maxwell and Murray. Instead, he would feint a frontal attack against Gaza, which was where the Turks would expect it, and support it with heavy artillery and a naval bombardment, while at the same time sending the bulk of his forces, led by the British and imperial cavalry, far to the right to attack Beersheeba and capture intact the vital wells there, then turn west and roll up the Turkish line from Beersheba to the coast. Alan Dawnay’s older brother Guy, on Allenby’s staff, was an enthusiast for “dirty tricks” in warfare, despite a formal manner and appearance. He busied himself building roads designed to mislead the Turks about the direction of the attack, raising dust by moving phantom divisions and corps, and he sent Major Richard Meinertzhagen, a soldier almost as unconventional as Lawrence himself, riding out too close to the Turkish lines to trick the Turks. As he galloped for home under fire Meinertzhagen dropped a satchel containing a forged set of maps and orders encouraging the Turks to expect that the attack on Gaza would be preceded by a feint toward Beersheba, and giving a date for the attack several days later than it would actually take place. Meinertzhagen, for some time a rival of Lawrence’s, was a very different kind of man: tall, violent, a world-famous ornithologist48 who took great pleasure in bashing in the heads of cornered Germans with his “African knobkerri” instead of taking them prisoner, and who, unlike Lawrence, enjoyed deceiving his friends as much as his enemies. He and Lawrence eventually became friends of a kind, but neither altogether trusted the other.