Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Woolley and Lawrence conferred and decided they must confront the Governor, and on 17 March they set off by horse for Birejik, twenty-five miles to the north. They crossed the Euphrates by ferry, and, leaving their mounts at the khan, marched briskly up the main street to the government serail, standing in the shadows of a twelfth-century castle. Woolley sent in his card to the Governor’s office. There was no reply, and after a decent interval, he sent in his card again. Minutes ticked past, and no response came. This was intolerable treatment for respectable British subjects, Woolley felt, and, bursting with righteous indignation, he and Lawrence forced their way into the Governor’s office and sat down unceremoniously in front of his desk. As decorously as possible, Woolley inquired why work on the site had been prohibited. The Governor, a corpulent, sly-looking old man with a goatee beard, replied that the firman granting permission to excavate at the site was made out to a Mr D. G. Hogarth, and, since neither of the gentlemen in his presence appeared to bear that name, they could not be permitted to start work. Woolley protested that he had letters from Hogarth and the British Museum, but these letters were in English and the Governor waved them aside. He might be able to permit work to begin, he said, if the Englishmen were prepared to pay the salary of an unofficial commissaire. Both Woolley and Lawrence then realized that he was fishing for a large bribe. Just what happened next is uncertain. Woolley claimed that he leapt up, drew his pistol, held it to the Turk’s head, and threatened to shoot him there and then. It seems more likely, though, that he merely told him that work would proceed whether he liked it or not, upon which the Governor said he would send troops to prevent it.

  ‘I only hope that you will come at the head of your soldiers,’ Woolley said. ‘Then I shall have the pleasure of shooting you first!’6

  ‘So,’ said the Turk. ‘You would declare war on the Ottoman Empire!’

  ‘Not on the Ottoman Empire,’ Woolley replied coolly. ‘Only on the Governor of Birejik.’7

  The Governor realized that his bluff had been called and caved in, declaring that he saw no reason why they could not start the following day, after all. This gunboat diplomacy had a great impact on Lawrence, for all his scorn of ‘ruling-race fantasies’, and he began to copy his new Director’s abrasive manner, just as he had tried to emulate Hogarth’s smoothness: ‘Woolley is really a most excellent person,’ he wrote to Edward Leeds. ‘You should have heard him last Sunday, regretting to the Governor of the Province that he was forced to shoot all soldiers who tried to interrupt our work at Carchemish and his sorrow that the first victim would have to be the little [Corporal].’8

  They returned triumphantly to Carchemish, where their tiny army of workmen had manned the diggings with rifles and pistols to repel the Turks. On seeing the Englishmen riding backjaunty and unharmed, the Arabs cheered enthusiastically and let rip with salvoes of shots. Haj Wahid – whom Woolley had left in charge – put ten rounds from Lawrence’s own Mauser through the roof of his tent in glee. The racket drew a troop of German engineers, who rushed down to see what they thought was a battle, only to collide with a cavalcade of horsemen escorting the Governor in person. He had come only to deliver an official apology and to reassure everyone that work could commence, turning a blind eye to the building of the Expedition House, even though Lawrence had not yet received permission from Istanbul. No doubt inspired by his insouciance, Lawrence impudently wired to the capital again suggesting that it would be convenient to have permission to build the house before it had actually been completed.

  The British had won the first round, but the Governor soon found a way to strike back. For the moment, though, they settled down to build their house, and Lawrence lifted a gloriously coloured and illustrated fifth-century Roman mosaic found in a field a mile away and installed it, piece by piece, as the living-room floor. The Expedition House became the ‘medieval hall’ he had dreamed about with Richards – a vast structure built round a courtyard, with no fewer than eleven rooms, including a dark-room. Lawrence practised the crafts he had learned as a youth to greater approval than he had received at home. He beat a bath and a firehood out of copper, built a table for the sitting-room, designed two armchairs which he had made for him in Aleppo, constructed basalt pillars and door mouldings, and eventually carved a mock-Hittite lintel over the door. He chose hangings and carpets, and crockery in the form of priceless Hittite pots and drinking-bowls, which he bought in neighbouring villages with Expedition funds, settling his conscience by resolving to let the Museum have anything which survived daily use. Descriptions of Lawrence at this time, indeed, portray him as something of a connoisseur – of carpets, Arab food, coffee, objets d’art, and other ‘beautiful things… to fill one’s house with’.9 Woolley said that the ‘evening Lawrence’ took on a very different aspect from the wild-haired youth of the day: ‘In the evening his hair was very carefully brushed,’ he wrote; ‘sitting in front of the winter fire reading… he would look with his sleek head and air of luxury extraordinarily unlike the Lawrence of the daytime.’10 The centrepiece of the sitting-room was a William Morris tapestry sent out from Oxford, which became an endless source of amusement to Lawrence. When European visitors arrived, they would invariably pass over the exquisite Arab textiles he had collected, and stand gaping at the Morris. When they inquired in what remote bazaar he had obtained the marvellous stuff, Lawrence would take great delight in replying, ‘Oh, you can buy it in Oxford Street for so many shillings a yard!’11

  Woolley and Lawrence kept open house, and frequently invited the German engineers to dinner in civilized fashion. But though Lawrence’s fears about the railway company carting away the ancient stones of Carchemish as railway ballast proved unfounded, he continued to harbour a secret grudge against them. He resented them ostensibly because ‘they did not know how to treat Arabs’, but actually because they had intruded on his private sphere, and formed an alternative centre of attraction for the natives. Lawrence’s skills lay in ‘handling’ the Arabs, a task he performed by harnessing the British tradition of colonial paternalism, nurtured over centuries. The Germans preferred more Teutonic methods of control, but the end was essentially the same. Although Lawrence genuinely tried to see things from an Arab point of view, and did so more successfully than most, his technique of’empathy’ remained a method of control. He believed the traditional Arabs morally superior to Europeans because they were ‘primitive’ and therefore ‘innocent’, but not intellectually so. The reality of his privileged position was stated frankly when he wrote: ‘Really this country, for the foreigner, is too glorious for words: one is really the baron in the feudal system.’12 His sense of rivalry with the Germans was submerged, however, for to begin with they lived in symbiosis. The engineers needed ballast for their railway, and the British needed to get rid of certain heaps of stones they had dumped in the previous season, in order to dig beneath them. It was agreed that the Germans would carry away the British stones, and the British would thus get their dumps moved without cost to themselves. This suited everyone admirably, except the part-owner of the site, Hassan Agha, who felt distinctly hard done by. One morning he strode into the German camp and demanded payment for his stones. The engineers explained that they could not pay and that if he insisted they would go elsewhere for their ballast. Hassan Agha then fled to Birejik to complain to the Governor, who suddenly saw his chance of revenge.

  A few days later, a lone horseman arrived in the camp carrying a summons. Lawrence was to appear in an Islamic court accused of having stolen the goods of Hassan Agha – namely the stones – to the value of £30, and sold them to the Germans. The summons was technically illegal, since foreigners were exempt from appearance in an Islamic court, but Lawrence decided to attend the trial as a courtesy, simply because the charge was so absurd. On the appointed day he rode off to Birejik and in the court – part of the government serail – he produced two documents: an agreement signed by Hassan Agha relinquishing rights to anything found on the site, and an affidavit signed b
y the German Chief Engineer, swearing that nothing had been paid for the stones. Lawrence also had with him documents authorizing their work at Carchemish. These papers, he thought, should be enough in themselves to have the case dismissed. He had reckoned without the machinations of the Governor, however, and was shocked when the prosecuting counsel produced six witnesses prepared to swear that the dumps had been paid for. The counsel asked to see all Lawrence’s documents and promptly confiscated them, leaving him bureaucratically naked. He arrived back at Carchemish that night far less contented than he had been on his departure. The work continued as before, however, until the Governor ordered the Corporal to post guards on the gate. Woolley managed to sidestep this development by taking the German-employed donkey-men on his own payroll, and having them dump the stones near the German lines.

  On the day fixed for the full hearing, Woolley, Lawrence and Haj Wahid, festooned with carbines and revolvers as if on a tribal raid, made for Birejik. To their surprise, they ran into Hassan Agha coming in the opposite direction, who told them that the case had been adjourned. Woolley refused to accept it, envisaging more exasperating delays, and they pressed on to Birejik, where they demanded to see the Governor. Woolley explained that they could not afford to keep halting work on the dig to ride to Birejik, and insisted that the case be heard that day as planned. The Governor seemed friendly and compliant, and neither Lawrence nor Woolley guessed his part in the plot. In the courtroom next door, a crowd had gathered to watch the fun, and a scribe took copious notes. Woolley stood up, announced that he was taking full responsibility for the case, and declared that the prosecution had no witnesses. The prosecuting counsel then asked the court for a week’s adjournment to find some, a proposal the judge agreed to at once despite Woolley’s violent protests. Woolley was incensed. He refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction and called loudly for the Governor. The judge laughed in his face, and told him that it was the Governor himself who held the papers authorizing work on the site. Only at that moment did Woolley realize what lay behind the conspiracy: ‘The trick that had been played on us and the Governor’s part in it were now quite clear,’ he wrote. ‘As long as they had the precious documents… I was at his mercy.’13 Woolley saw that a return to gunboat diplomacy was called for, and drew his pistol, declaring that ‘the Judge would not leave the room alive’ unless he got his papers back. The judge’s sneer froze on his lips, and he sank back into his chair. Woolley told Lawrence to go to the Governor’s office next door and demand the papers: ‘Woolley kept him in his place,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘while I went to the [Governor] and pointed out how unpleasant the position of the [Judge] was …,’14 Woolley recalled that Lawrence was gone only a few minutes and reappeared brandishing the papers, saying, ‘The blighter had them all in his own desk!’15 When Woolley asked if there had been any trouble, Lawrence answered, ‘None’, except that the Governor had wanted a copy of Hassan Agha’s contract made, ‘And could you oblige him with a penny for the stamp!’

  The affair was not quite finished, however. In May, when Hogarth arrived to take stock of the situation, he called on the Governor, who tendered his apparently sincere apologies and informed him solicitously ‘that he had used his authority to quash a case that should never have been brought’. Evidently this had not been made clear to the procession of soldiers which arrived at the Expedition House the following Sunday with a paper for Woolley’s inspection. The paper showed the verdict of the court – ‘guilty’ – and announced the sentence – payment of £30 plus costs. Woolley’s reaction was prompt: ‘I tore it into small pieces,’ he remembered, ‘and the procession went disconsolately back.’16

  Kenyon’s original intention had been to run the dig for only a short season, and as yet only two inscriptions had been unearthed. In May, though, Hogarth announced the wonderful news that an anonymous donor – actually a wealthy businessman named Walter Morrison – had donated £5,000 to support the excavations. The work could now continue indefinitely, and Lawrence decided not to go back to England that summer as he had planned, but to remain on the site to ‘keep an eye on the Germans’. A major reason for this change of plan was that Dahoum, whom he had wanted to take back to Oxford with him, had declined the invitation. Lawrence decided to put off his return until after the winter season. The site was closed in June, and he was frankly relieved to see Woolley off from Alexandretta: ‘I am my own master again,’ he wrote, ‘which is a position which speaks for itself and its goodness.’17 He rested for a few days in Aleppo, then returned to Jarablus, where he now enjoyed complete autonomy. His first move was to install Dahoum in the Expedition House, ostensibly to help Haj Wahid’s mother, who worked in the kitchen, but actually to assuage his loneliness. He occupied his time by holding impromptu classes in arithmetic and geography – the itch to improve once more outweighing his admiration for the ‘unspoiled Arab’. In geography, he taught his four students that the earth was round, eliciting the predictable question from one of them that if this was the case, how was it that the people on the other side did not fall off? The school soon had to be abandoned, however, when Lawrence went down with yet another dose of malaria, and no sooner had he recovered than Dahoum succumbed, followed by Haj Wahid’s wife and his baby son. The Haj himself later took to his bed with intestinal problems after a drinking bout, and Lawrence doctored them all.

  At the end of August, though, he suffered two more spells of malaria, and abandoned his resolution to remain at Jarablus all summer. He moved to Jebayyil on the Mediterranean coast, staying once again with Miss Holmes at the American Mission, where he had been made so welcome previously. This time he took Dahoum with him as his cook and servant. He later told Robert Graves that he and Dahoum had enjoyed a wonderful summer, masquerading as camel-drivers, sailing down the Syrian coast, helping peasants with the harvest, bathing and sight-seeing. In his contemporary letters he described this period as the most glorious summer he had ever had. That they actually passed themselves off as camel-men is doubtful, since Lawrence scarcely knew one end of a camel from the other at this stage, and Dahoum was little better. Certainly, though, Lawrence walked about Jebayyil in native dress, went sight-seeing to the famous Qasr of Ibn Wardan in the Orontes valley, and bathed in the sea with Dahoum almost every day. He was blissful: free at last, alone but for a boy he was devoted to, eating well, sleeping well, reading in the Mission library, and practising his Arabic. All his life he had hidden his feelings for others, repressed his emotions, stood aloof. With Dahoum – a ‘savage’, still little more than a child – he was able to open up completely as he could not do with anyone of his own age, race and status. With Dahoum, he felt unthreatened. He felt so close to the boy, in fact, that there was no need to play the fool or practise ‘whimsicalities’. With Dahoum, he did not feel out of his depth as he did with other, more conventionally ‘masculine’ men. He felt so absolutely comfortable with him that they were able to sit in silence together for hours, basking in each other’s warmth, not needing even to speak. His power over Dahoum was profound, and to the boy he must have appeared almost a wizard from a far-off land, a kind of magical godfather glimpsed only in fairy-tales. The relationship was not and could never be one of equality: socially they were as far apart, almost, as medieval serf and master – at least, this is the way Lawrence himself imagined it: ‘Dahoum is very useful now, though a savage,’ he wrote later that year; ‘however, we are here in the feudal system, which gives the overlord great claims: so that I have no trouble with him.’18 The boy whom Lawrence had a year previously acclaimed for his ability to read and write remained, in his eyes, a ‘savage’ whose most appealing qualities were his honesty and strength, and, not least, his ability to wrestle: ‘beautifully better than all of his age and size’.19 It was Dahoum’s ‘innocence’ which Lawrence appreciated most, by which he meant an innocence of the political realities of the world and the vast gulf of culture and economic power that lay between them. Lawrence despised more sophisticated Arabs because they were l
ikely to question the European assumption of authority, which Dahoum, in his ‘innocence’, did not. In short, Lawrence saw Dahoum as a beautiful boy who was entirely dependent on his own noblesse oblige and did not appear to resent it. Here was the perfect romantic subject for the most precious gift that Lawrence, in his omnipotent wizardry, could bestow: freedom – ‘the seven pillared worthy house’. Lawrence was utterly in love with this young boy, and for him he felt empowered to shift mountains, to inspire great tides of movement. His poem, most probably dedicated to Dahoum – Salim Ahmad – ‘I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars’, must rank as one of the most moving tributes to young love ever written.