To those who judged him by his quirky manner and his ill-fitting, wrinkled, off-the-rack uniform, the cuffs of his trousers always two or three inches above his boots, the badge sometimes missing from his peaked cap, Lawrence did not cut a soldierly figure, so most of them failed to notice the intense, ice-blue eyes and the unusually long, firm, determined jaw, a facial structure more Celtic than English. It was the face of a nonreligious ascetic, capable of enduring hardship and pain beyond what most men would even want to contemplate, a true believer in other people’s causes, a curious combination of scholar and man of action, and, most important of all, a dreamer.
Lawrence was also somebody who, however improbable it might seem to those around him in Cairo, aspired to be both a leader of men and ahero. He claimed that when he was a boy his ambition had been “to be a general and knighted by the time he was thirty,” and both goals would come close to being within his grasp at that age, had he still wanted them. Lawrence’s duties in Cairo seemed tailor-made for his talents. After an initial period of mapmaking, at which he was something of a self-taught expert, he soon turned himself into a kind of liaison between military intelligence (which came under the War Office) and the newly formed Arab Bureau (which came under the Foreign Office), a situation that gave him a certain independence. He became, largely through interviewing Turkish prisoners of war, the leading expert on the battle order of the Turkish army—which divisions were where, who commanded them, and how reliable their troops were—and sometimes edited the Arab Bulletin, a kind of secret magazine or digest that gathered every kind of intelligence about the Arab world and the Turkish army for the benefit of senior officers. Lawrence wrote a lot of the Arab Bulletin himself (published between 1916 and 1919, it would eventually run to over 100 issues and many hundreds of pages); and not only was it lively and well written (unlike most intelligence documents), combining the virtues of a gossip column and an encyclopedia, but it also reflected his own point of view, and had a considerable influence on British policy, both in Cairo and in London. Since Lawrence’s mentor from his undergraduate days at Oxford, the archaeologist and Oxford don D. G. Hogarth (repackaged, for wartime purposes, as a commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve) was a major figure in the Arab Bureau, Lawrence was naturally drawn more toward the bureau than toward military intelligence; but in both departments he found a certain number of kindred souls who were able to appreciate his keen mind despite his eccentricities and unmilitary behavior.
One of these was Ronald Storrs, Oriental secretary of the British Agency in Cairo, a civil servant and Foreign Office official whose job it was to advise the British high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon—the de facto ruler of Egypt, the position Kitchener had held until he joined the war cabinet in 1914—on the subtleties of Arab politics. It is remarkable but very typical of Lawrence that he and Storrs, though very different creatures, became friends on first meeting, and remained friends to the end of Lawrence’s life—Storrs would be one of his pallbearers. Storrs was sociable, ambitious, fond of the good things of life, an eminently “clubbable man,” to borrow a phrase from Dr. Johnson, and would go on after the war to become military governor of Jerusalem—a post once held by Pontius Pilate, as Storrs himself pointed out with good humor—and to a happy and contented marriage. Storrs regarded Lawrence with something like affectionate awe—"Into friendship with T. E. Lawrence I know not how I entered,” he would write in his memoir, Orientations; “then suddenly it seemed I must have known him for many years.” For his part, Lawrence would later describe Storrs in Seven Pillars of Wisdom with backhanded affection: “The first of us was Ronald Storrs … the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and the deepest, though his eyelids were heavy with laziness, and his eyes dulled by care of self, and his mouth made unbeautiful by hampering desires.” Storrs’s ambitions were realistic, and he pursued them sensibly and zealously—indeed, Orientations sometimes reminds the reader of Samuel Pepys’s diaries in its frank admission of a civil servant’s determination to climb the ladder of success—and they would eventually be achieved by marriage and a knighthood. By contrast, Lawrence sensibly concealed from Storrs his own more schoolboyish daydreams of being a knight and a general before the age of thirty, let alone of being a hero, in the full classical sense of the word, as well as a founder of nations. Nobody, least of all Storrs, could ever accuse Lawrence of “laziness,” “care of self,” or “hampering desires.” He loved to spend time in Storrs’s apartment in Cairo, borrowing books in Greek or Latin, which he was always careful to return, listening to Storrs play the piano, and talking about music and literature; but even so, Storrs seems to have detected early on that Lawrence was more than an Oxonian archaeologist in an ill-fitting uniform—that behind the facade was a man of action.
When, in mid-October 1916, Lawrence accompanied Storrs on a journey to Jidda in the Hejaz, the Red Sea port closest to Mecca, to negotiate with the infinitely difficult and obstinate Sharif Hussein ibn Ali-el-Aun about British support for the Arab Revolt, Storrs’s postprandial naps and his reading of Henry James’s The Ambassadors and H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling in the stifling privacy of his cabin on board a British steamer were interrupted by Lawrence’s “revolver practice on deck at bottles after lunch,” which “tore my ears and effectually ruined my siesta.” Had Storrs but known it, weapons had always played a significant part in Lawrence’s life—he was taught by his father to be an excellent shot, and on his journeys through the Middle East before the war as an undergraduate and an apprentice archaeologist he had always gone armed; on one occasion, he had fired back at an Arab peasant who fired at him, either wounding his assailant or startling the Arab’s horse; and on another he was beaten badly on the head with his own automatic pistol by a robber who, fortunately for Lawrence, was unable to fathom how to release its safety catch.
In later years Lawrence liked to say that he made himself so difficult in the role of a superior young know-it-all that military intelligence was only too happy to let him go to the Arab Bureau, which had more the atmosphere of a Senior Common Room at Oxford than of the army. He boasted of making himself “quite intolerable to the Staff…. I took every opportunity to rub into them their comparative ignorance and inefficiency (not difficult!) and irritated them further by literary airs, correcting split infinitives and tautologies in their reports.” Perhaps as a result, nobody objected when Lawrence took a few days’ leave in Storrs’s company, and Storrs was happy enough to have him as a travel companion.
Lawrence may have been the only person in Cairo who would have thought of a journey to Jidda as a lark. A stifling, dusty rail journey from Cairo to Suez was followed by a sea journey of almost 650 miles on board a slow steamer taken over by the Royal Navy, the heat made bearable only by the breeze of the ship’s movement. “But when at last we anchored in the outer harbor,” Lawrence wrote of his first sight of Jidda, “off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage that swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and smote us speechless.”