Part 21 (1/2)

Lawrence would only be wrong about the timetable; it was to be just thirty years until the British facade fell away and the state of Israel created, with Chaim Weizmann installed as its first president.

AS HIS TIME in Cairo extended, William Yale chafed under two enduring frustrations. The first was looking for any sign that his government was actually paying attention to events in the Middle East. Every Monday since late October 1917, he had been sending his long dispatches to Leland Harrison at the State Department, and hearing nothing back save for a handful of terse cables. Even his appeals for guidance-were his reports boring his readers? did the secretary want him to pursue another line of inquiry?-were met with silence.

Yale's second frustration was more personal, his inability to gain British permission to visit the war front. In their meeting of early March, T. E. Lawrence had invited him to visit the Arab rebel base at Aqaba, but Yale's request to that end had vanished somewhere in the British bureaucratic ether. With the Zionist Commission preparing to embark on its fact-finding mission to Palestine, Yale had pet.i.tioned to accompany it, only to be told by Gilbert Clayton that ”there might be some difficulty” with the plan. He had even broached the idea of attaching himself to a delegation of the American Red Cross Commission; alas, that nongovernmental organization hadn't warmed to the prospect of providing cover for an American intelligence agent. Really the only way to Palestine, Reginald Wingate patiently explained to the American emba.s.sy, was for Yale to be cla.s.sified as a military liaison officer and accredited to General Allenby's staff-which, since Yale wasn't in the military and never had been, was a diplomatic way of keeping him right where he was, sitting in Cairo.

Rather by default, then, Yale had focused his energies on what was arguably the more important task before him: getting the Wilson administration to realize what was at stake in the region. This was easier said than done, for despite Wilson's high-minded Fourteen Points proclamation, from what Yale could determine, ”our government had no policy. It was fighting, ostensibly, for nebulous ideals, little realizing that events are determined not at peace conferences, but by actions during hostilities preceding the peacemaking process.... The 'deus ex machina' of international affairs is not he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realize this simple truism.”

The bitter paradox in this situation-and the source of Yale's frustration-was that by the late spring of 1918, most of the interested parties in the Middle East were clamoring for the Americans to determine events. As early as October 1917, Reginald Wingate had floated to an American diplomat the proposition that the United States take over the ”mandate” of Palestinian rule in the postwar world, an idea that had continued to gain currency at the British Foreign Office. If to rather different ends, the hope of spurring American involvement had clearly been the subtext of Lawrence's emphasis during his meeting with Yale on the Arabs' high regard for the United States. Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists made no secret that, barring a British mandate, they'd be quite happy with an American one. Even the more imperialist-minded politicians of Britain and France and Italy appeared increasingly willing to accept a broad American role in the region since, barring their gaining of new lands, the most desirable outcome was that their European ”friends” not gain any either.

To Yale, however, the truly decisive factor was the burgeoning pro-American sentiment of the Arabs. While undoubtedly sparked by the promises contained in Wilson's Fourteen Points, this att.i.tude was also a fairly logical result of contemplating the mora.s.s of claims waiting to envelop the region in the postwar era. Yale's old friend Suleiman Bey Na.s.sif fairly typified these concerns. A moderate Arab Christian, Na.s.sif, even as he had reconciled to an expanded Jewish presence in Syria, remained deeply suspicious of British intentions, leery of King Hussein's pan-Arab nation, and adamantly opposed to French designs. The best, perhaps only way out of this mess, Na.s.sif explained to Yale, was for the Americans-nonimperialist, idealistic, far enough away to be minimally irritating-to step into the breach.

Yale wholeheartedly agreed, but looking for the right b.u.t.ton to push with the Wilson administration was a grinding task; at one point, he even tried for base economic self-interest, pointing out to Harrison that ”it is a well-known fact that certain American oil interests have recently obtained from the Ottoman Government extensive properties in Palestine,” one of the rare instances, presumably, when an intelligence agent was moved to inform on his own prior activities.

Finally, in late April, after months of extolling America's standing in the region to the State Department, Yale decided to act. It came after he met a man named Faris Nimr, a leader of the Syrian exile community in Cairo and the editor in chief of the hugely influential Egyptian newspaper al-Mokattam. As Yale explained to Leland Harrison, ever since the United States had joined the war, Nimr and a small cabal of like-minded Syrian exiles had looked to it as their homeland's potential savior. ”Quietly these few men have been spreading the idea of a sort of protectorate over Syria by the United States among the Syrians in Egypt, endeavoring to do this as secretly as possible that neither the British nor the French might become aware of it. This is an idea that appeals to both Christian and to Moslem.... It is stated by these ardent partisans of America that all the factions and all the parties among the Syrians would not only unite on the question of aid from the United States, but would rejoice if such were possible.”

While waiting for Harrison's response to this message, Yale received a bit of gladdening news from Was.h.i.+ngton on another matter. It had been decided to send a second special agent out to the Middle East, and once that man arrived in Egypt, it would be arranged for Yale to go on to Palestine. The name of his Cairo replacement, William Brewster, was very familiar to Yale; Brewster had been the Standard Oil representative in Aleppo at the same time that Yale worked for them in Jerusalem. Thus, while doubling the size of their intelligence network in the Middle East, the American government had ensured it remained within the Standard Oil recruiting pool.

With Brewster en route, Yale was hastily appointed a captain in something called ”the National Army”; perhaps not wis.h.i.+ng to appear churlish after their months of stonewalling, British authorities declined to inquire just what this curious ent.i.ty might be-the official name of the American army en route to Europe was the American Expeditionary Force-and instead congratulated the American agent on his military appointment.

”As soon as Cairo tailors could make uniforms for me,” Yale recounted, ”I began to prepare myself to be a soldier among soldiers. I had very little military training [actually none] and knew nothing about military matters and etiquette. For days I walked the side streets of Cairo in my new uniform, practicing saluting on pa.s.sing British Tommies. When they began to salute me automatically, with no smirks on their faces, I knew I was on the way to being a soldier.”

It was all in preparation for an occasion the newly minted captain rather dreaded, his formal presentation to General Allenby. In mid-July, Yale and the new American consul to Egypt, Hampson Gary, took advantage of a brief home visit by Allenby to make the journey up to his office in Alexandria. ”When we entered Allenby's study,” Yale recalled, ”I did not know whether or not to salute the General. I wondered whether I should stand at attention or sit down. The worry was needless, for General Allenby paid as much attention to me as though I was not there.”

The climactic moment came when Allenby abruptly turned in Yale's direction and, in his practiced stentorian voice, boomed, ”Well, Captain Yale, what are you going to do at my headquarters?”

”I am going to continue my political work, General Allenby,” he replied.

Wrong answer. ”Captain Yale,” the general bellowed, ”if the United States government wishes to send a butcher to my headquarters, that's their privilege, [but] you will remember when you are attached to my forces, you are a soldier!” Chastened, the American visitors soon beat a retreat, with Yale convinced that ”Allenby had cla.s.sed me, a former Standard Oil man, as one of those lower forms of life who engage in trade.”

The next day, Yale boarded a troop train for Palestine and his new billet at the British army headquarters at Bir-es-Salem, about ten miles east of Jaffa. He found reserved for him there a small tent, a cot, a writing table, and a canvas washbasin and bath. Also awaiting him was that peculiar feature of the European military officer cla.s.s of 1918, the batman, or personal valet. Among British officers, the most coveted batmen were Indian army soldiers drawn from units specifically trained for the task, but possibly in retaliation for his importune reply to Allenby, Yale's was a grizzled old Scotsman.

Despite the rustic nature of his new surroundings, Yale was undoubtedly pleased to be out of Cairo and away from a job that had seemed increasingly futile. Shortly before leaving for the front, he had finally heard back from the State Department in regard to the message he had sent about Faris Nimr and his cell of pro-American Syrian conspirators fully two months earlier. If not for prompt reply, his message had been deemed important enough to go up to the desk of the secretary of state himself. ”Referring your report No. 28,” read Secretary Lansing's cable of July 9, ”continue noncommittal att.i.tude relative American att.i.tude towards Syria.”

THE NEWS CAME to Lawrence as a jolt, but an exceedingly pleasant one. On June 18, he and Lieutenant Colonel Alan Dawnay, the new overall coordinator of operations in northern Arabia, went to General Headquarters to outline the plan for the Arabs' independent advance into Syria. They met there with General William Bartholomew, one of Allenby's chief deputies. Bartholomew listened to their presentation for a few minutes before shaking his head with a smile; as he told his visitors, they had come to Ramleh three days too late.

As Dawnay and Lawrence soon learned, what had transpired in Palestine over the previous month was one of the very rare instances in World War I when an army had been readied for combat operations ahead of schedule. In recent weeks, a steady flood of British and Indian army troops had arrived from Iraq and the subcontinent, taking the place of those Allenby had been forced to send on to Europe, and tremendous effort had been made in getting these troops into the line and swiftly integrated with the rest of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. So successful had this push been that at a senior staff meeting at headquarters on June 15, it was concluded the army would be ”capable of a general and sustained offensive” into the Syrian heartland as early as September.

For Lawrence, it meant there was now no reason for the Arabs to risk an unsupported advance into Syria. Instead, with Allenby's timetable closely matching that devised by Lawrence and Dawnay for the Arabs, the rebels could simply dovetail their operations with those of the EEF. Of course, timetables had a way of getting upended in the Middle East, so Lawrence was greatly relieved when on a subsequent visit to headquarters on July 11 he learned a firm launch date for the EEF offensive had been chosen: September 19.

In the interim, a political development had made the prospect of re- attaching the Arabs to the British effort even more attractive. In early May, a group of seven Syrian exile leaders claiming to represent a broad spectrum of Syrian society had written an open letter demanding to know in clear and unequivocal language precisely what Great Britain and France envisioned for their nation's future. London and Paris had tried to ignore the so-called Seven Syrians letter for as long as possible, but this time international attention wouldn't allow it; the matter had finally been dropped into the laps of the two men most responsible for the enduring controversy, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot. After much back-and-forth, in mid-June Sykes and Picot had answered the Seven Syrians that in those lands ”emanc.i.p.ated from Turkish control by the action of the Arabs themselves during the present war,” Britain and France would ”recognize the complete and sovereign independence of the Arabs inhabiting those areas and support them in their struggle for freedom.”

To Lawrence, here, finally, was the reaffirming of the promise of independence that he and the Arab rebels had been seeking for so long. But the formulation also reaffirmed the caveat that Lawrence had always suspected lay beneath the surface: Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves. In light of this, the rebels had every reason to join the coming British offensive. After his consultations at headquarters on July 11, Lawrence hurried back to Cairo, and then on to Aqaba, to start planning for the long-delayed Arab advance north.

One of the first tasks before him in that regard was to finally bring to an end Faisal's long and perilous flirtation with the Turkish general Mehmet Djemal. In late July, Lawrence pa.s.sed along to David Hogarth a copy of the peace offer letter that Faisal had sent to Djemal on June 10. The cover story Lawrence concocted to explain how he had come into possession of such an explosive doc.u.ment-he claimed to have surrept.i.tiously obtained it from Faisal's scribe-was absurd on its face, but apparently had a sufficiently Arabian Nights flavor to pa.s.s muster with his superiors.

Oddly, in London, the most immediate effect of this fresh revelation of Faisal's perfidy was to reactivate the debate, begun several months earlier but gone a bit dormant, on exactly which high honorific should be bestowed upon him. The episode pointed out a truly bizarre aspect of early-twentieth-century Britain: amid the bloodiest war in human history, and coinciding with a period so dark that the very survival of the British Empire was at stake, more than a dozen of the most important officials of that empire found the time in their schedules to voice their opinions, often repeatedly, on which medal should be given to a thirty-three-year-old desert prince. In doing so, all had ignored the counsel of the one Briton who knew that prince best, T. E. Lawrence, and his suggestion that Faisal wasn't much interested in medals.

On the morning of August 7, 1918, Lawrence gathered with his sixty-man bodyguard on the sh.o.r.e at Aqaba. His preceding weeks had been a blur of frantic preparation, and there was still a tremendous amount to be done before the Arabs would be ready to launch their September attack into the Syrian heartland. For Lawrence, though, the back-base grunt work of war-of organizing supply convoys, of plotting the movement of men and weapons across maps-was at an end; that day, he and his men were setting off for the interior, and would not return until the great battle had been joined and decided.

Embarking on that journey undoubtedly also raised a haunting ”what if” in Lawrence's mind. In October 1917, on the eve of the British army's first advance into Palestine, General Allenby had asked Lawrence how the Arab rebels might contribute to the a.s.sault. Fearing a slaughter of the rebels, Lawrence had kept the Arab contribution to a minimum, instead proposing his ill-fated charge against the Yarmuk bridge. How differently things might have turned out save for his hesitation at that time. If the Arabs had gone all in, this last year of crus.h.i.+ng stasis might have been averted, the war already over; also averted, of course, would have been Deraa, Tafileh, and the deaths of Daud and Farraj.

But now was the time to atone for all that. That morning in Aqaba he told his bodyguards in their colorful robes to prepare for victory, promised the Syrians among them that they would soon be home. ”So for the last time we mustered on the windy beach by the sea's edge, the sun on its brilliant waves glinting in rivalry with my flas.h.i.+ng and changing men.”

THE HEADQUARTERS OF the German army on the Western Front was a network of pleasant chteaus and stately hotels in the small Belgian resort town of Spa. It was there, on the morning of July 31, 1918, that Curt Prfer and Abbas Hilmi II were ushered into a conference room to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II. As Prfer recorded in his diary, Wilhelm gained ”the best impression” of the deposed khedive of Egypt, and was visibly impressed by his grand plans for the reconquest of his homeland from the British. At the end of the interview, the kaiser turned to Prfer and said, ”I request that you see me next time in a free Egypt.”

But if the German emperor's spirits had been buoyed by the visit, it produced a more muted reaction in his two guests. The kaiser had aged greatly during the war, and now seemed diminished, even slightly befuddled. To Prfer, attuned to the trappings and protocol of military life, it was clear that the German emperor no longer commanded much of anything, that for all his ostentatious medals and martial bearing he was now almost as much a figurehead as Abbas Hilmi.

It was very different from what either man had expected when they'd left Constantinople on July 23. In testament to the high hopes placed on their mission, they had been seen off at the station by an official Turkish government delegation that had included Interior Minister Talaat. But then had come the long, slow journey through the heartland of the Central Powers, images of deprivation and decline everywhere. To both men, the land and its people looked utterly spent, the situation far worse than just months earlier, and it belied the optimistic p.r.o.nouncements continuing to burble from the German high command and its talk of the approaching final victory.

If not before, they had surely grasped the fiction of those p.r.o.nouncements once they reached Spa. On July 17, the last of the five German offensives collectively known as the Kaiserschlacht, or Kaiser's Battle, that had been launched on the Western Front since March had been halted. Their number reduced by 700,000 more casualties, the remnants of the German armies were now falling back toward the Hindenburg Line, a fantastically elaborate wall of defensive fortifications that ran the length of northern France and that the Germans had begun building in 1917. Not only was there to be no German ”final victory,” but also no foreseeable end to the war; from behind the Hindenburg, Germany might hold out indefinitely, the battle grinding on without victors or vanquished for a long time to come.

This was certainly the a.s.sessment of generals and war planners on the other side of the front. Even with the flood of American soldiers finally beginning to reach France, the most optimistic Allied strategists were talking of a breakthrough in the summer of 1919, while their more conservative colleagues foresaw the struggle continuing far beyond; some a.n.a.lyses had the war going well into the mid-1920s.

Yet as with nearly every other a.s.sessment among the wise men of the Entente, these estimates were to be proven wrong. After the deaths of some sixteen million around the globe, the end was coming, and with a speed few could comprehend. Improbably, that collapse would start in one of the most remote and seemingly insignificant corners of the world battlefield, the deserts of Syria.

Chapter 18.

Damascus We ordered ”no prisoners,” and the men obeyed.

T. E. LAWRENCE, OFFICIAL REPORT ON EVENTS IN TAFAS, OCTOBER 1918.

It was September 12, 1918. The world war had now entered its fiftieth month. In contemplating its various battlefronts on that day, Allied military and political leaders were held in a certain thrall, their growing conviction that the enemy was nearing collapse tempered by the memory of how many times they had been wrong about this in the past. On the Western Front, the Germans had now ceded the last of their gains in the Spring Offensive to regroup behind the Hindenburg Line. The first Allied test against that defensive wall, the most formidable network of fortifications ever built, was to be a joint French-American operation near the Meuse River, scheduled for the end of the month. On the Southern Front, Italian commanders, at last chastened at having suffered over 1.5 million casualties over three years of war for no gain, were working up modest plans to move against an Austro-Hungarian army that had stood on the far bank of the Piave River for nearly a year. In the Balkans, a joint army of French, Serbs, Greeks, and Britons was preparing to push against a Bulgarian army in Macedonia. With the fresh memory of millions dead, the Allies viewed these proposed thrusts as of the testing-the-waters ilk, a chance to make some incremental gains before winter shut down offensive operations until the following spring, perhaps for even longer. British prime minister Lloyd George had recently floated a proposal to delay any all-out advance against Germany until 1920, when the American army would be fully ash.o.r.e in France and Allied strength might be truly overwhelming.

In this climate, people went about their lives with a sense of cautious optimism or quiet trepidation, depending on which side of the battle lines they dwelt, a budding belief that the worst war in human history was finally inching toward some kind of resolution, even if the particulars and timetable for that resolution remained as indistinct as ever.

On that September 12, Aaron Aaronsohn was on a pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p five days out of Southampton, bound for New York. Having returned to England from the Middle East in August, he had spent a frustrating few weeks shuttling between Paris and London trying to win support for his Palestinian land-buying scheme. That effort had been complicated by his usual sparring with Chaim Weizmann and other British Zionist leaders, and Weizmann and Mark Sykes had seen a way both to be temporarily rid of the irksome agronomist and to put him to good use by proposing that he embark on another rallying-the-troops mission to the American Jewish community. Once Aaronsohn's s.h.i.+p put into New York harbor, he had a full roster of meetings and talks planned that might keep him busy in the United States for months.

Curt Prfer's summer had steadily mutated from the strange to the surreal. After arranging Abbas Hilmi's audience with the kaiser at the end of July, he had spent weeks shuttling the pretender to the Egyptian throne around the German countryside, with official meetings and banquets in the khedive's honor interspersed with stays at the country estates of princelings and countesses. In the mountain resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in mid-August, the pair had met up with the kaiser's sister, Princess Viktoria von Schaumburg-Lippe, and her eclectic retinue of hangers-on, and had spent ten days in rather debauched merriment even as the news from the war front grew bleak.

”Growing intimacy with the princess and Grfin Montgelas and Seline von Schlotheim,” Prfer noted in his diary on August 30, referring to the kaiser's sister and two courtesans in her entourage. ”In the evenings, boozing, dancing and flirting, hectic room parties and the like.”

It wasn't all just parlor games, though. In Abbas Hilmi, Prfer was in the company of one of the world's most indefatigable schemers, and as the outlook for the Central Powers dimmed, the German spy chief seemed to latch onto the Egyptians' grandiose plots with a kind of anxious fervor. One involved trying to lure Abbas's son and heir, Abdel Moneim, out of Switzerland. As the ex-khedive explained, his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with s.a.d.i.s.tic inclinations-which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British-but if Prfer could somehow lure Abdel Moneim to Germany, his father could then arrange his marriage to the daughter of the new Ottoman sultan, thereby cementing Abbas's own claim to Egyptian rule. It was surely an indication of just how divorced from the real world Prfer was becoming that all this struck him as both a fine and important idea, one to be taken up at the highest levels of the foreign ministry.

But if the German spymaster increasingly lived in a deluded parallel universe, it was one in which he had a great deal of company. Not only did senior foreign ministry officials urge Prfer to proceed with the Abdel Moneim overture, but they beseeched him for help on another matter. Alerted to the conciliatory letter Faisal Hussein had written Turkish general Mehmet Djemal back in June, they now seized upon the idea of brokering a peace deal with the Arab rebels as a last-minute solution in the Middle East-a solution that perhaps would include their dear friends in the Young Turk leaders.h.i.+p, but perhaps not. Prodded by the foreign ministry for possible intermediaries to carry Germany's own secret peacemaking initiative to Faisal, Prfer pa.s.sed along the name of a contact helpfully provided by Abbas Hilmi.

If less colorful, William Yale's late summer was also proving frustrating. By September 12, he had spent more than a month in his tent at the British General Headquarters at Bir-es-Salem, in the foothills below Jerusalem. In that time, the State Department special agent-now reconst.i.tuted as the American military attache to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force-had learned virtually nothing from the British military command of Allenby's much-rumored coming offensive. This had not been for lack of effort; Yale had attended any number of intelligence briefings at which British officials seemed in quiet compet.i.tion with each other to impart nothing of substance, and had suffered through a host of tedious senior staff dinners even less illuminating. His repeated requests to tour the British front lines were put off with one excuse after another. He was finally given a partial explanation for this by a certain Captain Hodgson, the British officer detailed to serve as minder to the foreign attaches. ”I'll tell you, Yale,” Hodgson revealed, ”I was told to show you as little as possible, as you were a Standard Oil man.”

Yet the British had also unwittingly handed Yale an opening. Testament to the low regard with which they held the foreign military attaches in general, and him in particular, they had isolated them in the same corner of Bir-es-Salem as another distasteful group of camp followers: the resident press corps. From this motley a.s.sortment of British and Australian newspaper correspondents, far less restricted in their movements than the attaches, Yale was able to glean at least something of what was being planned, enough so that by September 12 he knew ”the big show” was soon to get under way. He didn't know when, let alone where, but in the growing sense of urgency that permeated General Headquarters, in the s.h.i.+fting of troops and materiel that the journalists reported seeing on their travels, were the unmistakable signs that Allenby's offensive was imminent.

But beyond their qualms over Yale's Standard Oil connection, General Headquarters actually had good reason for their climate of secrecy; what they were planning in Palestine const.i.tuted a very intricate ruse. In recent weeks, an array of British army units had been brought up from Palestine's coastal plain to take up positions around Jerusalem, their new tent encampments sprawling over the Judean hillsides. Amid this re- deployment, Allenby had moved his forward command headquarters to Jerusalem. Simultaneously, local purchasing agents had been dispatched to different tribes in the Amman region with orders to buy up enormous amounts of forage, enough to feed the horses and camels of a large army, come late September. To the watching Turks, the conclusion was inescapable: the British offensive was coming soon, and its target was to be the same Salt-Amman region where British attacks had failed twice before. In fact, however, those new tent cities were empty, Allenby's move to Jerusalem had been a charade, and the forage-buying effort was a red herring. Rather, the British plan was to strike at the very opposite end of the line, to sweep north along the Palestinian coastal shelf and then turn inland so as to envelop the Turks from three sides.

That was only one aspect of the ruse; another was playing out on the other side of the Jordan River. For some time, a mixed force of several thousand Allied fighters-Arab tribesmen, soldiers of the Arab Northern Army, British and French advisors together with specialized artillery and armored car units-had been making their way across the Syrian desert to gather at the old citadel of Azraq. If detected by the Turks-and it was hard to see how such a large force could go unnoticed indefinitely-it would serve to further confirm that the Allied attack was coming at Amman, just fifty miles to the west of Azraq. Instead, the Azraq unit's true target lay seventy miles to the northwest, the crucial railway junction of Deraa. Moreover, this unit was to act as the pivotal first shock troop for the entire offensive, their goal to shut down both the Hejaz Railway and its spur line into Palestine on the eve of Allenby's attack in order to paralyze the Turkish army from behind. By September 12, the last of these shock troops had arrived in Azraq, and were met there by the two British lieutenant colonels in charge of coordinating the operation: Pierce Joyce and T. E. Lawrence.

By that date, Lawrence had already been in Azraq for nearly a week, and had taken stock of the diverse fighting force as it drifted in: warriors from a dozen Arab tribes; the British and French transport and artillery specialists; a detachment of Indian army cavalry; even a small unit of Gurkhas, the famed Nepalese soldiers with their trademark curved khukuri daggers. On that same morning of September 12, the final component fell into place with the arrival in Azraq of the senior Arab rebel leaders.h.i.+p: Faisal Hussein foremost among them, but also Nuri Shalaan and Auda Abu Tayi and a host of other tribal chiefs whom Lawrence had helped bring to the cause of Arab independence over the past two years. With the vanguard of the attack force set to begin deploying the following morning, the plan was for these leaders to gather at a conclave that afternoon, during which Lawrence and Joyce would go over their various objectives.

Yet it was at precisely this juncture, on the eve of the campaign he had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly plunged into a paralyzing gloom. Shortly after Hussein and the other Arab leaders arrived, he slipped out of Azraq and made for a remote mountain cleft called Ain el Essad, some eight miles away. As he recounted in Seven Pillars, ”[I] lay there all day in my old lair among the tamarisk, where the wind in the dusty green branches played with such sounds as it made in English trees. It told me I was tired to death of these Arabs.”