In Arabia almost a century ago, a war began
that would lead to the creation of the modern Middle East.
At its epicenter was an Englishman
whose role would become legendary.
He would build vital alliances with the Arabs
and fight alongside them in a war of liberation.
Then he would play his part in betraying them.
Name?
Ross, John Hume, 352087, sir.
It was a false name.
The new recruit was Lawrence of Arabia.
Height, five foot six.
After the war, he went into hiding
and would spend his middle age as an ordinary aircraftsman
in the Royal Air Force.
34 chest.
Superficial wounds, sir.
God! And these?
Punishment?
Persuasion, sir.
Where were you?
Internment in Turkey, sir,
war in the East.
The scars were a reminder
that he would never be free of Arabia.
Lawrence of Arabia, prince of Mecca,
uncrowned king of the desert.
Images of Lawrence and the Arab army were played
in theaters around the world.
These were the years immediately after the First World War.
The public, exhausted by reports
of the horrific conflict in Europe,
were captivated by the story of this romantic warrior.
Lawrence was a remarkable military leader. He had that presence.
You feel they're touched, if not by the divine, by some special quality that
makes them special and makes people want to follow them.
Lawrence was a man of legend.
He was a complex man.
Uh, sometimes he put himself
as a very ordinary and very poor and very small man,
and sometimes he inflated his image to...
to an unbelievable, uh, size.
He was a rebel.
He played the system,
he understood the system, and he got away with things
that normal individuals just wouldn't get away with.
He was a significant player who affected history.
The legacy of the desert war and Lawrence's role in it
would have a huge impact on the Arab world.
The political landscape of the Middle East,
the relationship of the Middle East
with the other, uh, parts of the world,
the relationship of the components part
of the Middle East with each other
have all been laid down at that moment.
The film show made Lawrence a celebrity.
The public was thrilled by him, the press hunted him.
But the hugeness of what he had been involved in,
his own fame and his guilt at what he had done
threatened to overwhelm him.
Lawrence was 20 when he first arrived in the Middle East.
He had been preparing himself for this journey
since childhood.
Lawrence had been born into a family of private means,
but a family running from a secret.
His parents had never married;
his father had abandoned his first wife for the family's governess.
Lawrence and his brothers spent their early years on the move
living in Wales, Scotland, France and the Channel Islands.
The family eventually settled in Oxford
under the assumed name of Lawrence
at number two Polstead Road.
The young Lawrence would grow up very conscious of his height.
His younger brothers would soon outgrow him.
He would only ever be five foot, 51/2 inches tall.
He knew from the beginning that he was illegitimate.
He had that knowledge
of being outside of the established structure,
and that liberated him to be creative in some particular ways
that probably would not have been available
to children more conventionally brought up.
He spent most of his time alone, determined to prove himself.
He would go without meals, work through the nights
and force himself through physical tests,
cycling dozens of miles a day
through the Oxfordshire countryside.
His great passion was for all things medieval.
He became fascinated by the Crusades,
reading books about epic battles, codes of chivalry
and legendary heroes.
It was his passion for his history of the Crusades
that would take him to the Middle East.
As an undergraduate from Oxford University,
he had chosen to study
the design of the great Crusader castles.
It was an exotic and dangerous destination
for a young student traveling alone.
Hosn is the finest castle in the world,
certainly the most picturesque - quite marvelous.
Siune was I think the most sensational thing in castle building
I have ever seen.
In three months he walked 1,100 miles.
He would go many weeks without seeing another European face.
I have been on foot and alone all the time
so that I have, perhaps, living as an Arab with the Arabs,
got a better insight into daily life
than those who travel with a caravan.
The hospitality is something more than a name.
The common people are each ready to allow me
to share their meals without thought of payment.
I will have such difficulty in becoming English again.
Wandering through villages near the Euphrates,
his trip nearly came to a premature end.
Dear Mother, the adventures continue.
I read something in the Aleppo paper
about my being nearly murdered - absurd!
I suppose all my exercise is responsible for my good health.
In fact, Lawrence knew
he had been lucky to escape with his life.
To be blase and to dismiss something as nothing
is part of the heroic mystique:
"Not only was I, uh... went through great hardship and pain,
but it's nothing to me; I can handle it with, uh, great ease. "
I mean, that's... that fits the dynamic of heroism.
Lawrence returned to Oxford so thin
that one of his own professors did not recognize him.
A man came up to me who I did not know.
But when he spoke in his low, quick voice,
I found that it was Lawrence.
His thesis was singled out as utterly remarkable.
Lawrence was gaining a reputation
for his knowledge of the region.
Leading historians and archaeologists
He earned himself his first job,
a position as an archaeologist back in the Middle East.
In the next seven years,
Lawrence would watch the region slide into war
and the world around him change forever.
His base was the important historical site of Carchemish
at the junction of the great trade routes
to Damascus and Baghdad.
The archaeologists employed local Arabs on the excavation.
Here, Lawrence gained his confidence
working with the Arabs,
all the time improving his grasp of the language
and his skills as a leader of men.
He earned their respect and trust.
On one occasion intervening to stop a German engineer
from beating his Arab workers,
Lawrence threatened to thump the man if he tried it again.
It was also here that he met Dahoum.
Dahoum joined the dig as a water boy.
Lawrence picked him out to help him learn Arabic
and trained him as his photographic assistant.
There has been speculation about the extent of their friendship.
Lawrence had a very close relationship,
a real fondness for Dahoum.
Whether they had an active gay relationship, who knows?
But there are some curiosities;
I mean, they... they used to do things
like exchange clothing and take pictures of each other - a bit strange.
The local workers there thought that there was
a homosexual relationship between them,
But people said that Lawrence was just building that up- he liked to shock-
and, in fact, there was actually nothing
but an innocent but genuinely affectionate relationship
between the two of them.
The relationship would be
one of the most important in Lawrence's life
and become, perhaps, his inspiration.
A decade later, Lawrence would write Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
his account of the war in the desert.
one of the most celebrated books in the English language.
S.A. was Sheikh Ahmad, Dahoum's real name.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
to earn you Freedom, that seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me when we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road,
till we were near and saw you waiting.
Through his friendship with Dahoum
and other Arabs working at the Carchemish site,
Lawrence learned about the deep resentment they felt
towards the Turks who governed them.
For four centuries, the Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East
stretching Turkish influence from Constantinople to Mecca.
But the empire was weakening.
Turkey was now the sick man of Europe.
Britain, France and Russia were preparing to move in
if the empire collapsed.
That now seemed a real possibility.
Europe was heading towards the First World War.
The German Kaiser made a state visit to Turkey.
The Germans wanted an alliance with the Turks.
They offered military and strategic support
including the building of railways,
particularly a new railway to Baghdad.
Railways were strategically vital;
they were the fastest way to carry trade and arms.
In the tense international atmosphere,
the new railway was of considerable interest
to the foreign powers.
The archaeological site where Lawrence was working sat
on the route of the planned Baghdad railway.
He was about to enter his career in military intelligence.
A letter in a collection at the British Museum
includes an account from Lawrence about the building of the railway.
You asked about the railway,
which now runs four trains a day.
The line is to run round the walls of the Kalaat
and descend from the Euphrates.
I will send you a few photos in a week.
The station platform is to be 1,100 meters long.
There are to be 24 stone buildings.
They are working day and night shifts to hurry it on.
From what we see at Carchemish is Lawrence being groomed
to play the great game.
People have spotted Lawrence - talent spotters:
"This is a guy who could be useful to us in the future
"and... and let's try him out.
"Let's put him into this sort of environment.
"Let's get his language skills up.
"Let's get him managing people.
"Let's see what his mapping ability is like,
Photographic abilities- all these things which were practically important-
tradecraft - he was learning at Carchemish.
Sinai, 500 miles south of Carchemish.
Lawrence was recruited to join a team preparing
a secret military survey of the region.
He had been sent, he wrote, as a cover on a political job.
He took Dahoum with him.
With war looming,
the Turks tracked any suspicious archaeologists.
They sent soldiers after me.
They tried to stop me from going up Mount Horeb,
but we had lost or tired out all the soldiers
and reached the hilltop quite alone.
Lawrence was learning and falling in love with the land
with which he would become so dramatically associated.
Landscapes in childhood's dream were so vast and silent-
golden, misty dawns and the strange peacefulness of nature.
Lawrence was home in Oxford
when, on the fourth of August, 1914,
Britain declared war on Germany.
Two of his brothers joined up immediately.
Lawrence hunted impatiently for a posting
that would make use of his experience in Arabia and get him into the war.
Any young man in that era who couldn't get into uniform
felt frustrated.
This was the whole thing of Kitchener: "Your country needs you. "
"Why are you being a wimp back at home
"when you ought to be doing the right thing
out at the front line with the boys?"
God, the horrible boredom of having nothing to do.
I am longing for the Turks to declare war on the German side
so we will have a chance to take them on
and kick the Turks out of Arabia.
At the beginning of the 20th century
the Arabs were still a disparate people.
Their main focus was the religious capital Mecca,
and the family of the Grand Sharif Hussein bin Ali
that claimed direct descent from the prophet Muhammad.
Hussein bin Ali was considering a revolt against Turkish rule.
He dreamed of founding an Arab nation,
bringing together the thousands of tribes and principalities under a single government.
The Arabs looked to be the rulers of themselves instead of the Turks.
The Arabs wanted their independence and their unity.
That was the sure thing of the Arab world.
It was about creating a single nation
a single state, that would be independant
that would be powerful economically and militarily
and play its role on the international stage.
Hussein knew that a group of Arab intellectuals in Damascus
had formed a secret society pledged to fight
for Arab independence.
He sent two of his sons, Abdullah and Faisal,
to measure the political mood among the Turks
and to test Arab support for a revolt.
The Turkish Army controlled the region and cracked down hard on any hint of rebellion.
Emir Faisal was in Damascus when the Turks sentenced a revolutionary to death.
Faisal campaigned for the man's freedom.
He failed.
It was not an isolated execution.
Brutality was a hallmark of Turkish rule.
The Arabs were miserable following the secularization of the Ottoman state.
I remember those times as if it was a dream.
How could they be good times?
They were terrible.
Finally the Turks entered the war on the German side.
It was a decision that would have a dramatic impact on Middle Eastern history.
The decision was fatal.
It was certainly the gravest mistake
that the Ottoman Empire ever took in its entire history
over the... the... the five centuries that it lasted.
As the British poured thousands more troop
into mainland Europe, Lawrence had found a role in the war.
His knowledge of Arabic and Arabia earned him a job
in the British Army's intelligence section in Cairo.
Men who served with him remember meeting
a youthful but insignificant figure
who often neglected to wear his belt or cap badge,
whose hair was a little too long
and who had an instant disrespect for senior officers.
But he would soon distinguish himself.
The posting had landed him
in a strategically vital part of the British Empire.
Egypt gave the British control
over their interests in the Near and Far East.
It overlooked the Suez Canal
and the precious land routes to India,
and it gave them access to the great new resource - oil.
Lawrence became involved in gathering intelligence about the possible Arab revolt.
He interviewed prisoners and dissidents, ran agents
and helped to sponsor the idea of Arab insurrection.
The British War Office saw that an Arab uprising
could potentially destabilize the Turkish enemy.
Lawrence's role gradually became more political.
But he was largely office-bound
and very conscious that while he sat safely in Cairo,
his brothers were fighting the horrific war in Europe.
Will was serving with the Royal Flying Corps.
Frank was in the trenches.
In May 1915, Frank was lost in action near Arras.
Lawrence wrote home.
Frank's death was such a shock.
The hugeness of this war
has made one change one's perspective,
and I for one can hardly see the details at all.
I wonder where it will all end.
For the British, the war was going disastrously.
Tens of thousands of Allied troops
were being slaughtered at Gallipoli.
Turkish victory meant that the enemy army was released for battle elsewhere.
Troops were shipped south on the Hejaz railway.
The threat of a Turkish attack on British interests in Egypt,
maybe even the precious Suez Canal, was becoming acute.
The British War Office was increasingly concerned.
They wanted information on the Turkish threat,
and they wanted to recruit the Arabs
to fight against the Turks.
Urgent messages flew between London and the Cairo headquarters.
Please ascertain from prisoners the time the railway takes
to get from Syria to Constantinople.
Work to prevent any alienation of the traditional loyalty of the Arabs to England.
How many troops can each train move?
Please offer all support to plans for an Arab revolt.
Lawrence believed in the revolt.
He saw what it might gain for the Arabs
and for British imperial interests.
It's a big game, and at last one worth playing.
In Damascus, the Turks were working just as hard
to keep the Arabs under their influence and control.
The Turkish commander in the region
presented the Arab leader, Sharif Faisal, with a symbolic gift,
a rifle from a British soldier slain at Gallipoli.
The engraving read, "Booty captured in fighting,
presented by Enver Pasha to Sharif Faisal. "
The message was plain:
"Look who's winning the war,
and think twice before you take sides against us. "
The Arabs knew if they wanted self-rule,
they had no choice but to go to war.
They were also aware that their forces were ill prepared
to take on the organized and well-equipped Turkish military.
They would need an ally to support and arm them.
The obvious candidate was Great Britain.
Sharif Hussein was on the brink of making his decision,
but he needed guarantees.
He wanted Great Britain to declare itself on the side of Arab independence.
He wanted to gain Arab independence,
and he trusted the British
and he wanted to take a promise from them.
Hussein wanted a pledge
that no foreign power would try and take Arab land
from the Arabs after the war,
that if they fought, they would be guaranteed self-rule.
In 1915, opinion in the British government
doubted the revolt would last,
but it might delay the Turkish advance.
On that basis, the War Office was happy to promise anything.
Lord Kitchener authorized the dropping of propaganda sheets.
They declared the British promise
of no intervention in an Arab state
if the Arab nation assists England in the war.
They believed the promise.
They believed in the good word of Great Britain,
and of course that encouraged them to... to rise.
On the back of that promise,
Sharif Hussein called his people to war.
Arab forces have attacked the Turkish garrison at Medina.
Tribesmen under command of Emirs Abdullah and Faisal
have moved north towards Turkish lines.
It's a big game, and at last one worth playing.
Lawrence had the vision
and the ability to see... see things
in a much wider context than other British officials.
He did believe that this was a movement of national liberation,
and he did believe that the Arabs were capable
of enjoying independence and having sovereignty as a new nation.
Within weeks, the Arabs had victories to boast.
They captured the coastal towns of Yanbu' and Rabigh.
The Turkish garrison near Medina surrendered.
It was as if the whole Roman Empire started to crumble,
as if Hannibal had conquered Rome.
This is how it felt, that this... the hour of liberation had arrived.
The Arabs had begun to earn their independence,
and all they had to do is to continue in the same way.
But then the Arabs began to meet Turkish artillery and German aircraft.
The revolt came to a crashing halt.
The revolt had been limited to just a few thousand tribesmen.
There was little or no central command.
Most of all, they lacked modern weapons.
Reports reaching London suggested
the revolt had already run its course.
The skeptics in Whitehall were not surprised.
The communications from Cairo are hardly encouraging.
The Arab cause is evidently very weak cement.
The prospect of an Arabia united seems very remote.
I predict the collapse of the movement within months.
Lawrence was sent to find out
if the Arab leaders felt the revolt had a future.
It would be a dangerous expedition.
He was heading into some of the fiercest desert in the world,
and there was a real threat of attack by bandits
or capture by the Turks.
Lawrence appeared to embrace that risk.
First one and then another of my brothers has been killed.
They were both younger than I am,
and it doesn't seem right somehow
that I should go on peacefully in Cairo.
Lawrence always wanted to be a hero,
but now he must have also felt
that he had to do something real,
and I'm sure that was the... the thing,
the motivating force of those deaths-
that he had to get in now and do his bit.
Lawrence believed that the revolt was failing
because of lack of real leadership.
He was looking for someone who might be a figurehead,
who might have the character to relaunch the battle.
He headed north towards Wadi Safra to meet Emir Faisal.
Their relationship would eventually drive the war in the desert.
They were short of funds, short of arms.
The leadership was not happy with the whole situation.
So many Arab officers actually started to desert and leave the camp of Sharif Hussein.
So when Lawrence appeared on the scene,
everybody felt that perhaps this stranger could do something to break this deadlock.
Faisal and his men explained why they thought the revolt was failing.
He was deeply discouraged.
His men were tired; he had lost many of them.
They were in every way ill equipped-
little flour and rice, few rifles,
insufficient ammunition, no technical help, no information.
I said that my coming was expressly to learn what they lacked and to report it.
They accepted Lawrence as an officer representing a power,
an ally who could provide the revolt with weaponry and funds.
They respected him because he represented
the British government, no more or less.
Lawrence would begin his work with Faisal
as liaison officer attached to the Arab forces.
He began to draw up a shopping list of Arab requests.
Rifles: 2,000.
Ammunition: 100 boxes,
Dynamite.
Money: 16,000 pounds.
Tents.
Socks: two pairs.
Field glasses, if possible.
Rope.
Candles.
Lewis guns.
Cigarettes: 6,000.
Chinese silk.
Camel saddles.
The revolt was on its feet again.
But British support for the Arabs was not popular with all her allies.
France sent her ambassador Georges Picot
for urgent meetings with the British government.
France had always wanted a colony in the East.
They claimed they had shaped Syria since the Crusades
and argued that Syria was as good as French territory.
They feared that if the Arab revolt succeeded,
their claim might be threatened,
so they suggested a secret deal with the British,
dividing Arabia between them.
Before the war had even been won,
the British promise of Arab independence was critically undermined.
For now, Lawrence knew nothing of the backroom deals.
He was spending most of his time with Faisal in the desert.
Faisal suggested that if Lawrence was to live with the Arabs,
he should dress like an Arab.
It would help the tribes know how to respond to him.
It is the custom of the Arabs that when someone joins them,
he becomes one of them.
He was a man who lived with them, among them,
like someone from one of the tribes who had joined the revolution.
Lawrence argued the practicality of his new uniform.
Others suspected it had more to do with his romantic self-image.
It's appropriate that he wear Arab dress,
because he wants to represent himself
as a person of stature who fits in with the Arabs,
but there was always a bit of self-mocking in this,
and it was... it was... it was a playacting.
He enjoyed it at one level,
but he was playacting at another level.
But it worked.
Lawrence began to explore
how he could harness the Arab style of desert warfare.
Most wars are of contact.
Ours should be a war of detachment.
We were an influence, an idea,
a thing intangible drifting about like a gas.
The Arabs began to accept their new recruit.
They considered him as a friend,
as a man working actively on the side of the Arabs.
Of course, they respected him a great lot, of course,
when he went on the raids and planted dynamite.
They greatly respected him.
But some Arab historians suggest that at least in the early days,
Lawrence's role was as little more than a technical adviser.
Lawrence's role in the revolt
was as an explosives expert - that's all.
He instructed men how to use explosives
and trained them to blow up bridges and trains.
Nothing else.
In London, Georges Picot and Sir Mark Sykes entered detailed negotiations
dividing up the map of Arabia.
The French would get Lebanon
and a swathe of land across what is today Syria.
The British would take Palestine and most of Mesopotamia, modern Iraq.
The deal would be called the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
It completely ignored the promise the British had made to the Arabs.
It was a very treacherous thing.
There was a feeling of betrayal, a feeling that, to my mind,
and I'm telling you as honestly as I can,
it... it really has been the cause of the trauma
that we have been... and the terrible conditions
that you have been existing under for the last hundred years.
It's a horrible thing.
For months, London kept the agreement secret.
Eventually, word began to leak out among the British officers.
Lawrence had to decide whether to tell Faisal his men might be dying for nothing.
It's not clear what he knew or when he knew it,
but by his own admission in Seven Pillars,
Lawrence did not tell the whole truth.
I had to join the conspiracy
and assured the men of their reward.
I risked the fraud on my conviction
that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory.
Better we win and break our word than lose.
He certainly felt he... he'd deceived them.
How much he actually deceived them...
he was always exaggerating the darkness of his own role,
which gave people lots of ammunition.
Lawrence was being sucked into a betrayal
that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
I assured them that England kept her word in letter and spirit.
In this comfort, they performed fine things.
The blame to Lawrence may be
he gave promises in the name of Great Britain,
so the blame to him was a personal blame-
personal blame, that "You... you...
you were not honest with us. "
Perhaps if I had been honest then...
but we had dreams, and I could see a way
that we could win in spite of Sykes and Picot and the rest.
Britain's friendship with the Arabs
was not for the good of the Arabs.
It was a political friendship aimed at getting the Turks out
and taking control of Arab territory.
He was a British officer serving his country.
But, of course, he has his own ideas of serving his country.
We had dreams - I salved myself in the hope that by leading these Arabs madly
in the final victory, we could still win.
We could still win.
Lawrence began to hatch a plan that would allow the Arabs
to take control of their own destiny.
He convinced Faisal that if the Arab revolt
could reach the city of Damascus before the other allies,
they could force the British to give them their independence.
Damascus would be the key.
Damascus is a great city from old, old days,
and it was also the center of the group of nationals
who originally thought of the revolt.
In the psyche of the Arabs, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east,
there is a special spot in their heart for Damascus.
Damascus was the prize.
One of the greatest challenges facing Lawrence
was how to hold the tribes together.
He was suffering with bouts of malaria and dysentery
when an incident threatened to rupture
one of the fragile alliances at the heart of the revolt.
The man who had been killed belonged to one tribe, the killer to another.
Tribal law demanded the guilty man be executed.
But if he was killed by another Arab, a new dispute would erupt.
Lawrence took on the responsibility of the execution.
I told Hamed that he must die.
I made him enter a narrow gully, a dank twilight place.
Hamed cried out to me again and again.
I gave him a few moments' delay,
which he spent crying on the ground, then I made him rise.
As he lay in fever, Lawrence claims
he suddenly saw the revolt in broader perspective.
This is where he hatched his master plan,
the plan to attack Aqaba.
Aqaba was the one port on the Red Sea
that could supply the push north to Damascus.
The Turks still held it.
It was notoriously well defended.
Lawrence now decided that the Arabs must take it for themselves.
But how?
From the north, from El Jafr, came one of the men
who would enter the legend of the Arab revolt, Auda Abu-Tayeh.
When Auda entered the revolt,
all the tribes who might have feared or resisted the revolt
joined with Auda.
Auda was the hero, the knight of the revolt.
Auda was a hero.
Auda was a leader, the head of his tribe.
He was a champion of the oppressed.
And when the leaders of the revolt asked for his help,
Auda gave it.
Faisal had sent a message to ask Auda to come to him.
The Aqaba attack was so crucial to the revolt
that Lawrence and Faisal thought they must meet him eye to eye.
They drew aside a pace or two and looked at each other.
A splendidly unlikely pair-
Faisal the prophet and Auda the warrior,
each immediately understanding the other.
I knew from the force and directness of the man
that we would attain our end.
He had come down to us like a knight errant.
Faisal presented Lawrence
with the rifle the Turks had given him in Damascus,
the gun of a British soldier slain at Gallipoli.
They called Lawrence "the wolf,"
which meant an adventurer, daring, brave.
Those are the qualities of the wolf.
Those are Arab qualities, and the Arab man loved that in him.
The plan called for a small group
to ride across the open desert recruiting tribes along the way.
Then they would ride out of the mountains
and hit the Turkish defenses
where they would least expect it.
It was just the sort of expedition that most appealed to Lawrence.
The Arabs using their desert skills to even the odds, as reckless as it was brave.
But even some of the Arabs doubted they would succeed.
The struggle through the desert took its toll-
200 miles of dirt, heat, thirst and exhaustion.
We marched on over monotonous, glittering sand
and over those worse stretches of polished mud.
They blazed back the sun into our faces.
It was not a steady pressure but a pain ebbing and flowing.
The barren desert threatened to defeat us.
On the morning of July the sixth,
they stood in the mountains with Aqaba at their feet.
The future of the whole revolt depended on this attack-
500 lightly armed Arabs
against the heavily fortified Turkish stronghold.
Aqaba...
Allahu akbar!
They took the Turks completely by surprise.
Aqaba fell.
It cost the Arabs only two dead.
The revolt had scored its first major success.
From here it could reach across Arabia to Syria, to Iraq.
Until now British headquarters had viewed the revolt as a skermish, a side show.
The Aqaba victory changed that view.
Lawrence and the Arabs would become a crusial part of the war in the desert.
Leaving Auda in charge at Aqaba,
Lawrence insisted on reporting his own victory.
The news could not have reached the Allied command at a better time.
The Allies had just suffered tremendous defeats with heavy losses.
Generals were being replaced, and British officers fighting with the Arabs
had been questioning whether they could be led to any useful purpose.
Lawrence had proved them wrong.
He was recommended for the Victoria Cross,
promoted to major and celebrated in the War Office.
But he knew there was still so much to achieve.
The future of Arabia was in the hands of the tiny army celebrating at Aqaba.
And Lawrence still faced his personal battle
between loyalty to Britain and loyalty to his Arab friends.
Both would be decided if the race to Damascus could be won.