“Turkey seems at last to have made up its mind to lie down and be at peace with all the world. I’m sorry, because I wanted to root them out of Syria, and now their blight will be more enduring than ever.”

T. E. Lawrence to Winifred Fontana (The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett, published by Jonathan Cape, 1938).

Prophetic words from Lawrence! His time was indeed about to come. By the end of the month, Turkey had
entered the war as an ally of Germany; while in the
Geographical Section of the War Office in London, Lawrence was settling down to work as an acknowledged expert on the Middle East.