Allenby’s overbearing optimism simply rode roughshod over Lawrence’s self-doubts, and, with whatever reservations, Lawrence agreed “to take up again my mantle of fraud.” No doubt he knew better than to show a glum face. Allenby thus persuaded Lawrence to accept a significant change in tactics. For Lawrence, the Arabs’ great advantage over the Turks was space, the immense and empty desert. The Arabs could appear anywhere on its periphery in small numbers, attack the Turks, and then retire back into the desert, where the Turks could not follow them.

Now, Allenby wanted the Arabs to concentrate on the town of Maan and take it, cutting the railway south to Medina once and for all. Lawrence thought it could be done—or at least said it could be done—and even proposed a refinement of the plan. He suggested cutting the railway some miles north of Maan, so that in order to fight the Turkish garrison would have to come out into the desert, “where the Arabs would easily defeat [them].” This sounds like overconfidence on Lawrence’s part, but given his admiration for Allenby, or perhaps out of relief that the subject of the missing Ј30,000 worth of gold hadn’t come up, he may have laid it on a little thicker than he meant to.

In return, Lawrence had demands of his own. He would need at least 700 camels, to bring troops and supplies north from Aqaba—already, his purchases of camels in Arabia had driven up the price and reduced the supply—an immense increase in weapons, and, as usual, a lot more gold. More important, he wanted some assurance that the Turks would be prevented from bringing reinforcements down from Amman, with the obvious risk that the Arabs might be caught “between pincers,” from Medina in the south and Amman in the north. Allenby agreed, and explained that he intended to take Salt, and could then destroy as much of the railway as necessary, south of Amman. Lawrence was doubtful about the wisdom of Allenby’s plan—he knew the Arabs well enough to suspect that they would lose heart the moment the British fell back from Amman—but he seems to have kept this doubt to himself, though he hinted at his reservations to Allenby’s chief of staff. Perhaps this was because Allenby was one of the very few people Lawrence found it impossible to resist.

The next day, February 28, Lawrence was invited to a corps conference, at which the plans were dealt with in more detail, and during which Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, who commanded the XX Corps and would “direct the advance,” asked Lawrence “how his men were to distinguish friendly from hostile Arabs, since their tendency was to be prejudiced against all wearing skirts.” This was an odd—though sensible—question, to which Lawrence, who was of course in his white robe, replied, not very helpfully, “that skirt-wearers disliked men in uniform.” This caused some laughter, but did not, of course, answer Chet-wode’s question. In fact, during the relatively brief time when the British and the Arab army came into contact, there were many unfortunate incidents in which British and Australian troops took Lawrence’s Bedouin for hostiles, particularly because they tended to assume that all “natives” were thieves or cutthroats. Distrust of “wogs” was fairly widespread in the British army, but Lawrence’s victory at Tafileh had made the Arab army briefly more popular, and had given it a certain credibility among the British that it lacked when it was chiefly engaged in looting trains, however important such looting was to the cause.

Confidence in the Arab army was high enough that Lawrence asked for, and got, permission to use the Imperial Camel Brigade, a handpicked unit composed of British yeomanry and Australians mounted on Sudanese camels. The yeomanry were British volunteer cavalry units, usually formed in rural areas, with the local farmers, or their sons or tenants, serving as troopers, and the local gentry, or their sons, as officers. Lawrence complained that both the camels and the men were too heavy to cover long distances in the desert, and insisted that the men and their beasts be slimmed down, and trained to subsist on the bare minimum of water. With them as “shock troops,” he hoped to be able to threaten Deraa, when the time came, and fight the Turks as they attempted to retreat.

It was an ambitious plan, but despite the efforts of Lawrence, Alan Dawnay, and Joyce to supply such a widespread advance involving so many different elements, it failed to come off as planned. In the event, these plans were overshadowed by the German spring offensive on the western front in France, which breached the British line and sent the British army “reeling backwards on Amiens.” This was Germany’s last card, intended to drive the British back to the Channel ports; it used fifty additional divisions, which the Germans could withdraw from the eastern front now that the Bolshevik government had signed a peace. The Germans’ hope was to win a victory, or at least a negotiated peace, before American divisions arrived in quantity in France. Even so convinced an “easterner” as Lloyd George was startled by the size and ferocity of the German attack—it began with the biggest artillery barrage of the war, 1.1 million shells fired in five hours—and by the horrifying prospect that after four years of trench warfare and millions of casualties the Germans might still manage to drive a wedge between the French and British armies, take Paris, and push the BEF to the sea.* In the circumstances, Allenby’s plan to cross the Jordan River no longer seemed crucial, andvery shortly he would be stripped of two complete British divisions (as well as numerous artillery, cavalry, and machine gun units), and with them his superiority in manpower and firepower over the Turks.

It is hard to guess Lawrence’s state of mind in March 1918, while he was busy preparing for an advance which would not come off, and about which he was by no means confident. He spent some time in Cairo, where the Arab army now had its own little headquarters in the Savoy Hotel, and then returned to Aqaba, where he had to deal with a newcomer: Captain Hubert Young of the Indian army. Young, a fluent Arabic-speaker, had been designated as Lawrence’s “understudy” now that Lawrence’s indispensability had been recognized by almost everyone in Egypt. Lawrence went out of his way to be polite about Young, but the two men were a bad match, although they had gotten along well enough at Carchemish before the war. Young had deeply resented Lawrence’s presence in Mesopotamia in 1916, and he was not very much more tolerant of Lawrence now, though in the interest of civility he did his best to hide his feelings. A look at Young’s portrait in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is enough to tell the story: the touchy superiority, the suspicion in his eyes, the unmistakable look of a man who is standing on his dignity and fears he is about to be made fun of at any moment. It is by far the least appealing portrait in the book. Young at first remarked with some satisfaction that “Lawrence was only one of the many British officers who were helping the Arabs,” but then came to what was, for him, the dispiriting conclusion that although Joyce was in theory the senior British officer and Lawrence’s commanding officer, and Dawnay was officially the chief staff officer, “Lawrence really counted more than either of them with Allenby and Feisal, and used to flit backwards and forwards between G. H. Q. and Feisal’s headquarters as the spirit moved him.” The use of the word “flit” expresses perfectly Young’s disapproval of Lawrence and his flowing white robes.

No sooner had Young arrived at Aqaba than he was to receive a further shock—instead of a neat chain of command in which Major Lawrence reported to Lieutenant-Colonel Dawnay and through Dawnay to theircommanding officer, Colonel Joyce, it was announced that Lawrence himself had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel, and been awarded the DSO for Tafileh (“For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”), so that he was now equal in rank to Alan Dawnay, and Young was put even more deeply in the shade. Lawrence later dismissed Young’s role, relegating him to taking over “the transport, and general quartermaster work,” but that is not how Young saw his job, then or later.