Themed well, where Lawrence had watered his camels, was still there, standing by a single building in the shade of a thorn-tree. On the shoulder of the wadi side I saw the ruin of the Sinai Police barracks which had been deserted on that day in 1917 when Lawrence had arrived. We couched our camels and slid heavily off. Old Furrayj wrapped himself in a blanket and fell asleep under a bush. We sat down in the shade to make tea. Sabah’s leg was badly bruised from the saddle, and the soles of Mariantonietta’s shoes were worn right through. It was already ten o’clock in the morning, which meant that Lawrence had arrived here ten hours earlier. That added ten hours to our journey at least: instead of staying awake for forty-nine hours – already a difficult task – we were now faced with the prospect of staying awake for fifty-nine hours – probably much more, since our pace would slow down as we tired. I judged this almost impossible, and decided, to my bitter disappointment, that we must give up the expedition at that point.
I flew back to London, troubled: this was, I felt, a serious defeat. I had been travelling in the desert for almost twenty years, and had covered almost 16,000 miles by camel. In fact, I was far more experienced than Lawrence had been when he had crossed Sinai in 1917. He had then been twenty-nine years old and had made his first real journey by camel only nine months earlier. I was able to conceive that Lawrence might have been minutes ahead, but after two decades of riding camels I refused to accept that the discrepancy could amount to ten hours. Even if Lawrence and his men were hardier than we were – a point I was perfectly willing to concede – how was it possible for debilitated camels to have travelled so much faster than ours, yet still kept to a walk? It was the magnitude of the difference which affected me. I knew we had done our best. We had not delayed but slogged on solidly for an afternoon, an entire night and most of the next morning, covering sixty miles at a walk, averaging three to four miles an hour – a pretty good time by most standards. Our failure to keep up with Lawrence – or within a reasonable margin – threw my whole life’s experience into doubt.
A few days later I was working in the Manuscripts Room of the British Museum when an attendant put a small blue box on my desk. I almost got up to protest a mistake. I thought I had ordered Lawrence’s wartime journals – written in a military signals-pad: but this box, no wider than the hand, obviously did not contain them. I examined the contents out of curiosity, and found two tiny pre-printed Letts’ pocket-diaries, which I had never seen before. In fact, they were Lawrence’s ‘Skeleton Diaries’, which he carried with him, and in which he entered the place he had slept every night of the campaign. They were, I suddenly realized, the most genuinely contemporary of all sources. Idly, I turned to 6 July, the day Lawrence had ridden into Aqaba. What I read astonished me:
Friday 6th July
Entered Akaba 10 am. Read letter from Newcombe.
Left in afternoon. Slept at the head of Negb Akaba
Saturday 7th July
Watered at Themed. [Bir] Mohammad sunset.
Sunday 8th July
Passed Nekhl [illeg] Medifeh (Sudr Heitan)
Monday 9th July
Slept in Suez, very well. 5
Lawrence had not made the journey in forty-nine hours! In fact he had slept at the head of the pass, ‘Nagb Akaba’, and far from reaching Themed at midnight as he had claimed, he had made it to the well just before sunset on the following day –for Bir Mohammad, traceable on the map, lay only a few miles farther on. This meant that we had actually arrived at Themed a good six hours beforeLawrence: those hours he had spent sleeping at the top of the pass, we had been trekking stupidly into the night, trying to catch up with him. The diary entry made it clear that he had arrived in Suez not on the second but on the third day out of Aqaba – the forty-nine hour saga of Seven Pillarshad been a lie. Why Lawrence had lied in Seven PillarsI could not fathom, for I realized that he had not lied to his superiors. When I re-read the report he had made to Clayton on 10 July – the day he arrived back in Cairo – I noticed that it ran: ‘We entered Akaba on July 6th… I rode the same day for Suez with 8 men and arrived at El Shatt on July 9th.’ 6This report, published in Garnett’s letters in 1938, had been staring me and almost every other biographer in the face all the time. 7It had taken an agonizing night ride across part of Sinai – and very nearly the death of one old man – to bring it out. Lawrence must have realized that some day someone would notice the discrepancy, and this led me to suspect it had been deliberate – part of the great game of ‘whimsicality’ he had been playing since he had been a child, intriguing others by a cloak of mystery, ‘hoping [they] would wish to know whom that odd creature was’. 8How effective his ploy had been, I thought: here we were, eighty years on, still trying desperately to find out.
Lawrence’s perverse games do not, of course, lessen the fact that the capture of Aqaba was a brilliant achievement. It was the single great coup of his life. Though he was never to enjoy such an astounding success again, the Aqaba operation established him. It was imperative that Lawrence should have brought the news himself, for a messenger might not have been believed, but more than this, Lawrence was now able to convince his superiors that he was the indispensable conduit through which arms and money must flow to the Arabs. This, in turn, made his position among the Hashemites indispensable. Through Aqaba he became, as he himself put it, the ‘principal’ of the Arab Revolt. In Cairo he was feted by his superiors. Clayton sent a special message to the CIGS, General Robertson: ‘Captain Lawrence has arrived after a journey through enemy country which is little short of marvellous …He started at Wejh on 9th May with 36 Arabs and marched via Jauf and Nebk, crossing and dynamiting the railway en route.’ 9Robertson returned his personal commendation, and shortly Lawrence, the ‘Temporary Second-Lieutenant Interpreter’, found himself a full-blown major. Fortunately, his arrival in Cairo also happened to coincide with the appointment of General Sir Edmund Allenby as GOC. In early 1917, Murray’s forces had twice attacked Gaza in Palestine, and had been thrown back with almost 6,000 casualties. Allenby, it was hoped, was made of sterner stuff. Lawrence, who was given an audience with the great man, wandered into his office barefoot, dressed in his soiled Arab clothes, and played his customary game of mystification. He had produced a detailed report based on his secret journey to the north, claiming that he could deploy no less than seven forces of Arab levies in various key positions, which could, by the end of August, threaten the lines of communication of the Turkish army in Jerusalem. This amounted to a general Arab rising in Syria, including the capture of Damascus – though Lawrence stressed that it could only take place if the main Turkish force was held down by Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force on the Gaza-Beersheba line, and thus prevented from drafting new battalions to the Hauran. It was an ambitious – almost fantastic – proposal, and Allenby watched Lawrence curiously, unsure ‘how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan’. 10For Lawrence, the General was imposingly paternal, and would join the roster of father-figures which he spent his life compiling – a list which included Hogarth, and would one day include Thomas Hardy and Lord Trenchard. He would later complain that while service – ‘voluntary slavery’ – was his deepest desire, he had never found a chief capable of using him – it was Allenby, though, who came nearest to his ‘longings for a master’: ‘What an idol the man was to us,’ he wrote, ‘prismatic with the unmixed self-standing quality of greatness, instinct and compact with it.’ 11Allenby’s reaction to Lawrence is less easy to gauge. He later wrote that he thought Lawrence a brilliant war leader, and noted that his work was invaluable throughout the campaign. Yet he is also on record as saying that in reality the Arabs were no more than a distraction for the Turks, and that there were other officers who might have done an even better job than Lawrence. This was post factumspeculation, of course. For now, Lawrence had just captured Aqaba, and even if his Arabs were simply a distraction, such a distraction was a million times better than having them join the enemy. Allenby was a realist, and knew that anything Lawrence did in Syria – even if it failed – would tie up Turkish forces. The General’s massive inscrutability made it hard for Lawrence to judge how much he had ‘caught’ him, but as usual the performance worked, and Allenby promised to do what he could for his Arab allies.