Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Lawrence’s letters from this period show the soi-disant critic of the Renaissance and the ‘age of reason’ at his most self-contradictory: he criticized ‘foreigners who always come out here to teach whereas they had much better learn’,22 for instance, but concurrently declared with pride that he had taught Dahoum to use his reason as well as his instinct. He told his mother happily that there was as yet no ‘foreign influence’ in the district, neglecting the obvious powerful influence of two Englishmen: ‘… if only you had seen the ruination caused by French influence, & to a lesser degree by the American,’ he wrote, ‘you would never wish it extended.’23 In the case of Dahoum, the colonial itch to improve gained the upper hand, for within a month he was writing to the American Mission School in Jebayyil for books with which to begin his ‘education’. These were to be ‘Arab’ not ‘foreign’, though Lawrence appeared to notice no inconsistency with his passionate defence of the ‘Arab untouched’ only a month before. For him it was only the ‘touch’ of other foreigners – particularly the French – which was likely to corrupt: he had no wish, he wrote, to do more for Dahoum than to give the boy a chance to improve himself, which, it might be argued, is precisely what the foreign missions thought they were doing. Lawrence was able to remove himself magically from the equation, because he believed that his influence was entirely benign. This view began with the perfection of the Englishman as its premise. The Arab could never aspire to be an Englishman, but had a duty to be ‘good of his type’ – to encourage this, Lawrence thought, the Englishman should learn his language, assimilate his customs and admire his traditions: ‘ [catch] the characteristics of the people about him,’ as Lawrence put it, ‘their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner.’24 Once he had done so, he might ‘direct men secretly, guiding them as he would’.25 Lawrence disdained other colonial styles, particularly that of the French, because, conversely, the Frenchman held himself up as an example to be imitated: rather than learn Arabic, he encouraged the Arab to learn French; rather than learn Arab customs and traditions, he encouraged the Arab to ape his own. The result of Lawrence’s style of colonialism would be a people with their own distinct cultural patterns, firmly but covertly under British dominion: the result of the French style, a ‘vulgarized’ and acculturated people who were unable to attain the heights of the European, but had abandoned all traditions of their own. Lawrence was desperate to avoid such a situation at all costs. He thought Dahoum ‘excellent material’ for improvement, and later taught him to take photographs on the site, but Woolley found his intelligence decidedly limited, and far outshone by his startling good looks. It was his physical perfection rather than his ability to reason that Lawrence celebrated when, two years later, he made a sculpture of Dahoum naked and set the finished sculpture on the house roof. He may have believed that it was Dahoum’s mind that interested him, but in fact he was attracted physically to the boy. Woolley noted obliquely that though Lawrence never admitted feeling affection for anyone, the affection for ‘certain people’ was ‘there and deeply felt’.26 Quite simply, in Dahoum – Salim Ahmad – SA – Lawrence had found the one great love of his life.

  When Hogarth and Grigori left on 20 April, Lawrence compounded his oddness by moving out of the house and sleeping on the site – either on the mound or in a trench – a development which must have struck the Arabs as very strange indeed. Lawrence believed it brought him closer to them, though they themselves would not have dreamed of sleeping anywhere but in their own quarters. The excavation was not proceeding well. It was costing £40 per week, but as yet they had little to show but the odd lion’s head, basalt relief, and heaps of pottery: no Hittite inscriptions or hieroglyphic texts had been found. When, in May, having found nothing but a Roman coin, the fragment of a lion’s mane and a Byzantine wall foundation for the entire week, they struck solid bedrock, they almost abandoned the diggings then and there. It was under these despairing circumstances that they received a visit from Miss Gertrude Bell, a distinguished Arabist and archaeologist, who had arrived expecting to find Hogarth. Miss Bell belonged to the long British tradition of dominant ladies, who by dint of privileged birth and determination had managed to extrude themselves into a world of men. She was influential, and if she should report back to the British Museum the true state of the excavation, Lawrence feared, it would automatically be closed down. He had already acquired a taste for the lotus-eating life here, and had set his sights on returning for another season. His attitude to Miss Bell was, therefore, understandably defensive. He thought her pleasant enough, but not beautiful ‘except with a veil on, perhaps’,27 and at first he found her too captious by half. When she criticized the way the excavations had been carried out, he and Thompson tried to ‘squash her with a display of erudition’,28 racing volubly over subjects as disparate as Byzantine architecture, Greek folklore, Anatole France, the construct state in Arabic and the price of riding-camels. After ninety minutes of this onslaught, he said, Miss Bell was happy to have tea, and retreat ‘back to her tents’, murmuring defeatedly that they had ‘done wonders’ with the digging.29 This was Lawrence’s account: Miss Bell, seemingly oblivious of any friction, simply added a reginal note to her diary that she had met Thompson and a young man called Lawrence, who, she predicted, was ‘going to make a traveller’: ‘They showed me their diggings and their finds,’ she wrote, ‘and I spent a pleasant day with them.’30

  In June, however, Lawrence’s worst fears were realized when Thompson received a telegram from Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, stating that the trustees had been so disappointed with the results of the dig that there would be no second season. There was nothing to be done but to clear up the diggings, glue together those pots which could be glued, and close up the site. In July Thompson and Lawrence moved down the Euphrates to Tel Ahmar to decipher some Hittite cuneiform scripts. From here, Lawrence set off on foot to revisit Urfa and to see Harran, Birejik and Tel Bashar – the region in which he claimed to have been attacked in 1909. Like that excursion, this one also ended in ignominy, when, less than three weeks later, he crept back into Jarablus, spoiling for malaria and dysentery, with festering bites on his hands and his feet in shreds once more. Almost the entire village turned out to greet him, and after an hour’s council, Hammoudi brought him bread, fried eggs and yoghourt and left him, mercifully, to eat alone. That night he slept on the roof with a splitting headache, and woke to see the sunrise over the Mesopotamian plain, with high fever. He staggered doggedly off to Carchemish, intending to measure various trenches, but when Hammoudi tagged along to assist Lawrence fell into a blind rage and bellowed at him, sending him away for no apparent reason. Having reached the mound, he promptly fell flat on his back and lay there motionless for seven and a half hours in a cold sweat, with his head bursting. When he finally summoned the effort to get up, he was astonished to find it was three in the afternoon. He lurched towards the trenches with his tape-measure, but some were deep, and he could not trust himself to take any measurements without falling inside. The trek back to Jarablus village was one of the most fearful marathons he had ever endured: it took him two hours to cover the three-quarters of a mile distance. That evening he scrawled letters with a hand so heavy he could hardly hold the pen, and sent a runner with them to Birejik to summon a carriage and invoke the aid of the Governor and the local doctor. Many Arabs, including Dahoum, came in to wish him well, but he was so sick that he could scarcely see them. All the next day he lay prone in the Hoja’s house, troubled by spurts of diarrhoea to relieve which he had to hurry outside, once fainting and cutting his cheek badly on a sharp stone. In the evening he was comforted once more by a visit from Dahoum. On the third day there was no sign of the carriage from Birejik, and Lawrence began to fear that the messenger had absconded with his money. Though Hammoudi was taking great pains to make him comfortable, he found himself becoming intolerant of the ‘dreadful bore’, and was irritated by the way the Hoja seemed to repeat every sentence five o
r six times, implying that Lawrence’s Arabic was poor, and emphasizing his foreign-ness. In his weak condition, Lawrence’s Arabic might well have been unintelligible: in fact, he may have owed Hammoudi his life.

  While he lay in a half-stupor, the Hoja was fighting a battle with public opinion. His neighbours – almost all of whom had worked on the dig – advised him cold-bloodedly to throw Lawrence out, for if the Englishman were to die, they said, the ex-bandit Hammoudi would certainly be accused of poisoning him for his money, and arrested and imprisoned by the Government. The Hoja dug his heels in, however: to have turned Lawrence out would not only have violated the Muslim code of hospitality, but would also have been a considerable affront to an employer who might possibly offer him a job in the future. Lawrence must have overheard the heated arguments which ensued, for he gave Hammoudi a letter addressed to his father stating that if he should die, the Hoja was not to blame. For three days his life hung by a thread. Dahoum came to visit him each day. Then, on 1 August, there was a slight improvement, and Lawrence managed to drag himself painfully, with long rests, to the river for a much-needed wash. At four o’clock that afternoon the runner arrived back from Birejik without a carriage, saying that the local doctor and the Governor had refused to help. Lawrence was now in dire straits. He was faced with a five-day wait while he sent someone to wire for a carriage from Aleppo, or a ride on horseback to Membij, where there were carriages for hire. He decided to try for Membij, but it was a further two days before he felt strong enough. Just as he was about to set off, Hammoudi turned on him and refused the loan of his horse, without which, he knew, he had no chance of reaching the place. Furious at this sudden and inexplicable reversal in his host’s generosity, Lawrence teetered to another part of Jarablus with Dahoum’s help, and managed to hire a horse to take him to Tel Ahmar, where he might hitch a lift to Membij. One added problem was that he had no cash to pay for the horse, but the owner generously let him take it on trust on being told that he would change money in the bank at Tel Ahmar and send Dahoum back with both horse and cash. They travelled by night, under a fair moon, and reached the Euphrates by Tel Ahmar at dawn, to find their way cut off by the swollen Sajur. Dahoum plunged in, swam across, and brought a boat to ferry both Lawrence and horse to the far shore. There, Lawrence managed to change his money at the Syrian Bank, and sent Dahoum off happy with a metallik (half a crown) and his neighbour’s mount. He lay helpless in a hemp plantation until about mid-morning, when he managed to beg a ride on a wagon bound for Membij. There, after a long agony of bickering with the drivers, he hired a carriage for Aleppo, where he arrived on 5 August, and put himself gratefully to bed in the Baron’s Hotel.

  The fever came and went, and though he managed to do some shopping in the bazaar with Haj Wahid, and even to quiz local dealers about his camera, stolen in 1909, he frequently felt himself falling into semi-faints. He sat down to dinner once in the Baron’s with his head spinning, and only regained his senses long enough to call the diner sitting opposite ‘a pig’, causing a tremendous uproar. The man was a. Greek Jew and his friends wanted Lawrence to apologize, while a group of beefy German railway engineers weighed in on Lawrence’s side, and the hotel manager ran around the tables wringing his hands. After three days Lawrence took a train to Damascus, and on the 12th, after another terrible night of fever, he sailed from Beirut. ‘Boat very full of people, all Syrians apparently,’ he managed to write in his diary. ‘Left Beirut 11am. All over.’31 He had survived the most fascinating and decisive year of his life by the skin of his teeth, but over it was not. All the way from Jarablus he had been nursing a letter from Hogarth saying that the second season at Carchemish was, after all, still under consideration – ‘The best news,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘that I have heard this long time.’32

  7. The Baron in the Feudal System

  Carchemish and Egypt 1911-13

  By November Lawrence was back in Jarablus, fully recovered from his illness. Sir Frederick Kenyon of the British Museum had been persuaded to re-open the dig at Carchemish, partly because of the pressure whipped up in the press, much of it by the influential Hogarth. A letter published in The Times in late July, entitled ‘Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia’, though, had also played its part, cleverly evoking British chauvinism by suggesting that the stones of ancient Carchemish were to be used as ballast for the German Berlin – Baghdad railway, which was about to reach the Euphrates. Although it was ascribed to an anonymous ‘Traveller’, this letter was actually the work of Lawrence: his first brilliant attempt to manipulate public opinion to his own advantage by using the establishment media. Kenyon had not only agreed to re-open the site, but had taken on Lawrence as a salaried assistant at 15s. a day. To replace Campbell-Thompson, who had decided to marry, he had appointed Lawrence’s old acquaintance, Leonard Woolley, as Director.

  The German railway company was much in evidence on Lawrence’s return, constructing store-sheds and barracks for their workers in preparation for the wooden trestle bridge they planned to erect. Raff Fontana, the British Consul in Aleppo, had already told them in no uncertain terms that the Carchemish site was British property, and they were not to touch a single stone or blade of grass. The Germans, who had agreed to place the bridge slightly farther to the south, did not know that Fontana’s claim was false. Lawrence’s task in the district that November was to find out who the land actually did belong to, which entailed delving into the government archives at Birejik, with the help of Haj Wahid and a dragoman from the British Consulate in Aleppo. What they discovered was not encouraging. Out of the entire area of 160 denums of land, 120 belonged to a local landowner called Hassan Agha, while only forty had been purchased on behalf of the British Museum in 1879. Lawrence guessed that this situation would lead to problems in due course. His stay was a brief one, however, for he had made arrangements to work for a short period under Professor Flinders Petrie in Egypt, to improve his knowledge of archaeological field methods. He and Haj Wahid left Jarablus by coach on Christmas Day, 1911, in torrential rain. Crossing a footbridge over the Sajur, the coach slipped and overturned into the river, submerging one of the horses, pinning down another, and leaving the third thrashing about madly. Lawrence and the Haj, who had fortunately been walking ahead, plunged in to save their belongings, while the driver battled frantically to pull up the head of the drowning horse. Many of Lawrence’s things were carried off, and at one stage the Haj was almost washed away when he lost his footing and fell headlong into the torrent. It took two hours to extract the carriage in the freezing rain, and, as their lunch was well and truly soaked, they dined on a walnut each and an unlimited supply of muddy water. It was, said Lawrence, ‘the most memorable Christmas I’ve ever had’.1

  He joined Petrie at Kafr Ammar, fifty miles up the Nile from Cairo, in January 1912. Though he had dreamed of Egypt as a boy, he found the Professor’s style too ordered and systematic for his taste, and disliked the work, which consisted mainly of disinterring heat-mummified bodies. Petrie, whom Lawrence had met briefly as a schoolboy at the Ashmolean, was the most distinguished British archaeologist of his day. No patrician Oxford sophisticate of the Hogarth school, he was a self-trained excavator who had begun as a humble surveyor without any systematic education, and had used his great gifts to transform the practice of Egyptology. Before Petrie, Egyptologists had been little more than glorified treasure-hunters, obsessed with uncovering temples and carrying off vast statues for museums. Petrie had been the first to turn his attention to the despised minutiae of archaeology: the scribble on a potsherd, the fragment of an amulet, the remains of a ring. His methods of dating included the use of stylistic degeneration, which later became standard practice. At close quarters Lawrence found Petrie monumental ‘like a cathedral’, and he was amused when, after he had turned up on the site in a blazer and shorts, the Professor told him bluntly: ‘They don’t play cricket here.’ Lawrence, who was wearing the same dress he had worn at Carchemish, realized that shorts were considered infra dig in
Egypt, though the reference to cricket made him chuckle: ‘I expect he meant football,’ he later wrote.2 He felt a great sense of admiration for Petrie, but thought him dogmatic and opinionated. He also developed a strong distaste for the Egyptians, who, unlike the Arabs of Jarablus, would not play the colonial game of reassuring the Englishman that they were not diminished by his power. Lawrence found them ugly, dirty, dull and gloomy and ‘without the vigour’ of the Jarablus men. He could not talk to them with the same ‘delicious free intimacy’,3 for either they were surly, reminding him of his status, or else they ‘took liberties’, ignoring it. Neither of these styles was acceptable to Lawrence, for the Arab was supposed to treat the Englishman with a rough and ready frankness which gave the illusion of equality, without overstepping the mark into disrespect. In Egypt the gulf between the powerful and the powerless was clear to see: in Syria it was comfortably disguised. These prejudices, and the ache to be back with his friends at Carchemish, did nothing to stymie his energy, and Petrie was impressed enough to offer him a salary of £700 to supervise a dig at Bahrein or somewhere else in the Persian Gulf. Lawrence was tempted, but the call of Syria proved too strong, and by the end of February he was back at Carchemish.

  Woolley was tied up in Egypt till March, and Lawrence had orders to proceed with the building of an Expedition House as a permanent base. As soon as he reached Jarablus, he recruited twenty-two men and started on the foundations, but the work was halted by the Corporal commanding the Turkish guard which had been posted to the site since Lawrence’s last visit. The Corporal inquired politely if he had permission to build a house. Lawrence answered that his sponsors had been given permission and that the local Governor was perfectly aware of it. ‘Quite so,’ said the Corporal, ‘but that Governor is gone.’4 There was no alternative but to suspend work while the Corporal wired Istanbul for permission, and a fortnight later Lawrence was still waiting for an answer. He travelled to Aleppo to meet Woolley, who arrived on 10 March expecting to find the house ready. He was irate when he discovered that work had not even begun, and whipped off a cable to Kenyon in London, demanding action. There was worse news to follow, however. When Lawrence and Woolley turned up at the site a few days later, and began enrolling workmen, they were told by the same Corporal that work was prohibited. Woolley dispatched a curt letter to the Governor asking him to curb the Corporal’s interference, and, confident that he would receive a prompt reply, proceeded to recruit 120 men. The Governor did not even deign to answer Woolley in person. Shortly, the Corporal arrived with a letter stating that the Governor did not know who Woolley was, and that work could under no circumstances commence. ‘This was a nasty shock,’ Woolley wrote; ‘… to put off the diggings now meant not only a waste of time, but would destroy the men’s confidence and respect – an important thing in a country none too civilised.’5