PROLOGUE

In the selva oscura that is the "Middle" East - a term invented scarcely before these events took place - the Ottoman Empire, its Sultan a thousand year old spider in a rotten web, remained loosely united until the Great War brought radical disintegration. It was an empire ruled by pashas, petty chieftains, local sheiks and vague emirs, dervishes, hunchbacks and eunuchs; madness knit together by the power of Islam and the New Turks whose hero, Enver Pasha, led his country toward the Abyss.

Then in the shimmering Arabian deserts war was born. Kitchener's war. The British brought firearms and mechanized vehicles, cannon and mines to smash the Ottoman insects still crawling about their provincial network.

Unlikely warriors with lavender faces and ethical demeanor: Wingate, Clayton, Allenby, Young, Lloyd, Stirling, Joyce, with appalling innocence and arrogance. They attempted not only to command, to rule, but to stamp British culture on the Middle East while carving "nations" of convenience out of shifting dunes, playing games with official dispatches and convening "conferences" - as they had designed and handed over vast areas of the globe already to politically malleable Arab rulers. An Empire of Ideas doomed from the start.