The conference with the Turkish General to which he and two others went across the Turkish lines with a white flag and with handkerchiefs bound over their eyes, was merely an attempt to ransom, on grounds of humanity or interest, those of the garrison of Kut whose health had suffered by the siege and whom captivity would kill, and to persuade the general not to punish the Arab civilians in Kut who had helped the British. After these things had been not very satisfactorily settled—they got nearly a thousand of the sick exchanged against healthy Turks; they should have got three thousand—the conference developed into a mere exchange of courtesies. In these, however, Lawrence and Colonel Aubrey Herbert, who was with him, would not join. When the Turk said, ‘After all, gentlemen, our interests as Empire builders are much the same as yours. There is nothing that need stand between us,’ Herbert replied shortly: ‘Only a million dead Armenians,’ and that ended the conference.

Lawrence had one more task; to explain to the British Staff in Mesopotamia, on behalf of the High Commissioner of Egypt, that the help promised to Sherif Hussein did not include a support of his claim to the Caliphate, the spiritual headship of the Mohammedan world, as was believed in India, with alarm. The official Caliph was still the ex-sultan Abdul Hamid. Having done this, he came away. Kut surrendered (half its garrison died in captivity and the Turks hanged a number of the Arab civilians) and the remainder of the British Army, whose advance the local Arabs continued to resent, lost enormous numbers of men and spent another two years in reaching Bagdad.

Things were going from bad to worse. The British High Commissioner, who had made the promises to Sherif Hussein on behalf of the British Foreign Office, found himself in difficulties. The general commanding the British forces in Egypt, who took his orders only from the War Office, did not believe in the Revolt and was not going to waste men, arms or money over it. His rule was ‘No side shows.’ It is possible also that he did not like the High Commissioner, a civilian, to be interfering in military matters. So, outside Medina, Feisal, waiting every day anxiously for the artillery and other stores which had been promised him, and with his own private treasure nearly spent in paying his armies, was left in disappointment and inaction. After the landing of a few native Egyptian troops and stores at Rabegh nothing much more was done; and it seemed that the Revolt was already over. Many of the staff officers at Cairo looked on all this as a great joke at the expense of the High Commissioner. They laughed that Hussein would soon find himself on a Turkish scaffold. As plain soldiers they had a fellow-feeling for the Turk, and could not see the tragedy and dishonour that they were intending. To make matters worse a French military mission was arranging an intrigue against Hussein in his towns of Jiddah and Mecca, and was also proposing to the harassed old man military schemes that would have ruined his cause in the eyes of all Mohammedans.

In Cairo Lawrence had come to be more plagued than ever by generals and colonels, and he discovered that since his great interest in the Arab Revolt was known he was about to be put in a position where he could not do much more to help it. He decided to get away in time. He asked for permission to go, but it was not given, so he began making himself so obnoxious that the General Staff would be only too glad to be rid of him. He was already known as a conceited young puppy and began a campaign of pin-pricks, correcting the grammar of the most senior officers and commenting on their ignorance of the geography and customs of the East. The break came in this way. The chief of staff one day rang him up on the telephone. ‘Is that Captain Lawrence? Where exactly is the Turkish Forty-first Division now stationed?’ Lawrence said, ‘At So-and-So near Aleppo. The 131st, 132nd, 133rd regiments compose it. They are quartered in the villages So-and-So, So-and-So, and So-and-So.’

‘Have you those villages marked on the map?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you noted them yet on the Dislocation files?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they are better in my head until I can check the information.’