Lawrence took careful notes of everything he saw—the unhappiness of the Egyptians; the shortage of rice, barley, and flour; the number of men still armed with ancient muzzle loaders or single-shot rifles rather than modern bolt-action British Lee-Enfields or Turkish Mausers. Had he been educated at Sandhurst instead of Jesus College, Oxford, his eye for military detail and deficiencies could hardly have been sharper. He got from Feisal and Feisal’s officers a detailed account of the failed attack on Medina, including the fact—which Feisal did not mention, but those around him did—that when the Turkish artillery had opened fire, driving the Arabs into retreat, Feisal himself had ridden up and down through the barrage trying to rally the fleeing tribesmen, a gesture worthy of Bonaparte’s at the crossing of the Rivoli, but in this case unsuccessful. The attack on Medina had been “a desperate measure,” Lawrence concluded, more desperate than was appreciated in Cairo and London. When one of the local tribes, the Beni Ali, discouraged by the Turkish artillery fire, had offered to surrender “if their villages were spared,” the Turkish commander, Fakhri Pasha, had heard them out patiently, carrying on a long, polite, slow negotiation in the eastern manner, while in the meantime his troops assaulted one of the Beni Ali villages, raped the women, murdered “everything within its walls"—men, women, and children—then set fire to the houses and threw the bodies of the hundreds they had killed into the flames.
Fakhri Pasha and his troops had played a significant role in the bloody Turkish genocide of the Armenians; they were now determined to teach an equally harsh lesson to the Arabs. Though the Arabs were capable of great cruelty, it was a strict rule of desert warfare that the women and children of your enemy were spared. This was a new kind of war to them.
Feisal talked strategy to Lawrence, and found that their minds worked as one. Like Lawrence, he could see very clearly the routes the Turks could use to isolate Rabegh and advance on Mecca, once they concentrated their forces. Neither Lawrence nor Feisal was a professional soldier, but Lawrence had a good knowledge of strategy; and Feisal was a realistic judge of what his own troops could do (as well as what they could not), and knew how to lead and to keep together the different tribes who would otherwise have been at one another’s throat. Feisal was confident that, given better weapons and modern artillery, he could stop the Turks from taking Mecca, but he still imagined that if he moved in concert with Ali from Rabegh and Abdulla from Mecca, Medina could be taken by a three-pronged attack. Lawrence already doubted the wisdom of this, and would soon think of Medina not as a danger spot to be eliminated, but as a fatal trap for the Turks.
The two days that Lawrence spent with Feisal’s army in Wadi Safra were of critical importance both to him and to the future of the Arab Revolt. First, he was the only British officer who had actually seen Feisal’s Arab army “in the field"; second, he had made his mind up about Feisal—here was the prophetlike figure he had been searching for and had failedto find in Feisal’s brothers. Perhaps most important, Lawrence had established himself in Feisal’s mind as the one man who could and would persuade the British to send the equipment, supplies, and instructors that the Arab army so desperately needed. Lawrence was very frank about what he thought could (and could not) be had from Cairo, but he also, rather recklessly, took on himself the responsibility for artillery, light machine guns, and so on to the Arabs—an amazingly bold commitment for a temporary second-lieutenant and acting staff captain.
Despite the fact that the two men got along well together, there were still areas of difficulty that lay unplumbed between them. Feisal, for example, wished aloud somewhat wistfully that Britain was not such a “disproportionate” ally, and remarked that while the Hejaz might look barren, so did the Sudan, yet the British had taken it anyway. “They hunger,” he said, “for desolate lands.” The Arabs, he pointed out, had no desire to exchange being Turkish subjects for becoming British subjects. There also hovered between them the much thornier subject of British, French, and Russian ambitions in the Middle East.
Lawrence already knew of the existence of the Sykes-Picot agreement. Although it was supposedly secret, it was the kind of thing that was impossible to hide in the close world of military and political intelligence in Cairo, where everybody knew everyone else and the atmosphere was that of a Senior Common Room at Oxford. Lawrence may not, at this stage, have known every detail of the agreement, but he certainly knew that in May 1916 Sir Mark Sykes, a wealthy Conservative member of Parliament who was something of a passionate traveler in the Ottoman Empire, and Franзois Georges-Picot, a French diplomat who at the outbreak of war was the French consul in Beirut, had negotiated a Franco-British agreement apportioning to their respective countries large areas of the Ottoman Empire. France was to get an area (the Blue Zone) consisting of what is now Lebanon and a “zone of influence” including Syria and extending eastward to include Mosul, in what is now Iraq, and a large area to the north; Britain was to get an area (the Red Zone) thatwould include the rest of what is now Iraq, from Baghdad to Basra, as well as the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms and a “zone of influence” extending westward to include what is now Jordan.
Once Sykes and Picot brought the agreement to Petrograd for the approval of the czarist government, they found themselves obliged to cut the Russians in on the deal—imperial Russia insisted on fulfilling its old ambition of annexing Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, as well as much of Armenia, and also insisted that control of the Holy Land—i.e., Palestine—be shared among the three powers, so as to place the Christian holy sites under the protection of France (nominally Catholic), Russia (representing the Russian, Greek, and Serbian Orthodox churches), and Great Britain (Protestant) and thus to satisfy religious opinion in the three major Christian faiths. In November 1917 the situation would be further complicated by two events. First, immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they published all of imperial Russia’s secret treaties, to the great embarrassment of the French and the British. Second, in London the Times published Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild, stating publicly that the British government would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This letter injected a further religious and racial element into an area which also contained Muslim holy sites and a largely Muslim population, and which most Arabs believed was part of the territory they were fighting for.
Though both Lawrence and Feisal would later claim ignorance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, this was certainly not true of the former, and probably not true of the latter. The British, in their endless negotiations with Sharif Hussein, had always been careful to avoid agreeing to any specific frontiers for “the Arab nation,” and had pointed out, though without much emphasis or detail, that France and Britain had certain “historic” claims to territory in the Ottoman Empire that would have to be respected. This insistence that the division of the spoils should come after the Allies’ victory was intended in part to get the Arabs fighting. The idea left floating delicately in the air, and expressed withexquisite diplomatic tact by Kitchener, Wilson, Storrs, and others, was that the harder the Arabs fought, the more they might hope to claim at the peace table; but it was also a reaction to Sharif Hussein’s breathtaking and meticulously detailed demand to be made king of an Arab nation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and including all of what is now Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.