The camera, its tripod and magnesium flares, and the heavy pistol with its wooden holster were Lawrence’s basic baggage. His wardrobe was minimal; a light suit with abundant pockets, two thin shirts and one change of socks. In Beirut, Lawrence bought a solar topee and a water bottle. As things turned out, he was inadequately equipped for his task.
His walk had three aims. The first was the inspection of the fortifications of the Crusader states, including those at Urfa, a remote town in eastern Syria which, as Edessa, had been the capital of a Crusader country that had flourished between 1099 and 1147. During this stage of his peregrination, he intended to carry out a commission from Hogarth and visit Jerablus, a township on the upper Euphrates close to the mound under which lay the Hittite city of Karkamis (known then as Carcemish). Hogarth had given Lawrence a further assignment, buying Hittite clay seals. Since 1905, Hogarth had been laying plans to restart the Karkamis diggings under the auspices of the British Museum and, in 1908, he had made formal application for permission from the Ottoman government.7
Knowledge of the Hittites and their civilisation was still fragmentary. Written historical references were scarce to what archaeologists believed was a Hittite empire which had dominated Anatolia and northern Syria between 1350 and 1250 BC. A growing number of artefacts which could be ascribed to the Hittites had been appearing in Europe since the 1870s and had stirred up much interest. What most intrigued scholars were the seals with their inscriptions in either cuneiform script or hieroglyphs, which were studied in Britain and Germany. The beginning of the century saw a fresh and determined effort to solve the mysteries of the Hittites. As the pace of research quickened, the lead was taken in 1905 by Dr Hugo Winckler of the Royal Museum in Berlin, who began digging at Boghazkoÿ, which was considered to be the choicest site. In the following year, Professor John Garstang and a team from Liverpool University started work at Sakcagozu, northwest of Aleppo.
Karkamis, once a thriving city on the southern marches of the Hittite empire, had been neglected after some amateurish probing by the British Consul in Aleppo in the late 1870s. He had uncovered remains of a royal palace and had taken the precaution of buying a third of the site for a bagatelle on behalf of the British Museum. Hogarth believed that Karkamis had potential and hoped that discoveries there would enable him to trace connections between Hittite and early Greek art. While his prime motive was the extension of knowledge about an obscure culture, there was an underlying element of rivalry with the Germans. Filling state museums with objects recovered from remote lands was a prestigious form of cultural imperialism. From the turn of the century, German scholars had taken advantage of their government’s growing political friendship with the Ottoman empire to get official permits to dig up the choicest archaeological sites.
Lawrence’s assignment to gather Hittite seals, his examination of the Karkamis site in 1909 and his extended periods excavating there between 1911 and 1914 have been the subject of much recent speculation. This has given rise to a theory that his archaeological investigations were a red herring with which he drew the Ottoman authorities away from his real purpose, which was to spy on the railway works just south of Jerablus. Not that there was anything to see in 1909, since operations to build a bridge over the Euphrates did not begin until January 1912. The finished bridge carried the Aleppo-to-Baghdad link of the Berlin–to–Baghdad railway, an enterprise largely financed by the French–controlled Imperial Ottoman Bank, undertaken by German engineers and using German-made track, engines and rolling-stock. The commercial and strategic potential had been immediately appreciated in Britain, where there had been apprehension about a line which directly connected Germany with the heart of a region which was considered a buffer zone between Europe and the Indian empire. Yet the line was being built by a public company (which was running short of funds by 1913) whose activities were well known and could be read about in its annual reports. If, during 1912 and 1913, Lawrence took it upon himself to spy on the German surveyors and civil engineers he would have found out nothing that was not already well known to the British government.8
Central to the contention that Lawrence went to Syria as a secret agent is the assumption that his academic sponsor, Hogarth, was a spymaster whose scholarly sightseeing and excavations were a cover for intelligence-gathering in the Ottoman empire. In this guise, he had singled out Lawrence as a likely recruit who would in time, like him, masquerade as an archaeologist and spy on the Turks and their German friends. This is quite simply absurd.9
In the first place, Hogarth had a deeply rooted distrust of all governments and bureaucracies. More importantly, the British government had no need of him on its payroll. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Admiralty and Foreign and War Offices possessed intelligence departments with tiny staffs which were mainly concerned with cataloguing military, naval, political and economic information which came into their hands from various sources. Among these were loyal British subjects who travelled abroad and reported anything which they believed ought to be known to their government.
Lawrence was one of these sources. At least once in 1912 he passed on local hearsay to Raff Fontana, the British Consul in Aleppo, arrogantly claiming that what he gathered from his regular dragomen was ‘rot’. Even so, Fontana in his reports to the Ambassador in Constantinople preferred to set down what had been collected in remote districts by the dragomen. Lawrence also claimed to have carried out another patriotic duty in 1913 when he addressed Lord Kitchener, then High Commissioner in Egypt, and revealed his fears about the extent of German penetration in Syria. He was dismissed with a prophecy that a general European war was imminent and that the best thing he could do was to get back to his diggings. What he had to say was well known anyway.10
Lawrence clearly felt impelled to bring such scraps of information as came his way to the attention of the government. Others went further and indulged in active sleuthing, like the fictional yachtsmen in Erskine Childers’s spy thriller The Riddle of the Sands (1903). Laurence’s future intelligence colleague Philip Graves, another Englishman on the loose in Syria, went in for private espionage. In 1905 he had taken a train on the newly opened Damascus-to-Maan line and kept his eyes and ears open for any hints of future Turkish military plans. A drunken German railway engineer told him that when completed the line would carry soldiers as well as pilgrims bound for Mecca, which would have surprised no one. In Maan, Graves snooped about and overheard Italian railway workers gossip about a projected branch line to the Red Sea port of Aqaba, from where a reinforced Turkish garrison might menace the Suez Canal. So blatant were Graves’s enquiries that a Greek café owner asked him whether he was a spy. So he was, and so also were other watchful British tourists, many of them army and navy officers on extended leave. What they stumbled across sometimes had its value. In February 1915, when Lawrence and the rest of the intelligence staff at Cairo were collating information about Alexandretta (Iskanderun) for a projected invasion of Syria, they were assisted by Captain Boyle, a naval officer who before the war had navigated the offshore shoals ‘for sporting purposes’.11
As to Hogarth, he was always conscious of the strategic and political importance of the Middle East and as a traveller in the area, he was aware of the chronic instability of the Ottoman empire and its vulnerability to foreign penetration. These were the everyday preoccupations of British diplomats and soldiers and were frequently vented in the serious press. Hogarth had been at Winchester with Sir Edward Grey, who from 1906 was Foreign Secretary, and he had remained in contact with him, no doubt proffering advice and suggestions. A patriot, he volunteered his services as an adviser to Admiralty Intelligence and in this capacity was canvassed by Lawrence to represent the views of Military Intelligence in Cairo. At the time, Hogarth had no official post or rank. During the summer of 1915, he approached Compton Mackenzie, then running a Naval Intelligence office in Athens, and asked him for an ‘Intelligence job’. Like Lawrence, Mackenzie was attracted to Hogarth’s ‘very rich an
d abundant personality’, but could only suggest that he open an office in Sofia. The idea of Bulgaria dismayed Hogarth, whose face took on the ‘expression of a dramatist being invited to go out to Hollywood and work for the movies’. A further disappointment followed in August when Hogarth failed to get an intelligence post with the Gallipoli expeditionary force. His fortunes soon changed; on 25 October he was commissioned as a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, in spite of being fifty-three, and two months later was appointed Director of the new Arab Bureau in Cairo. If Hogarth had been a key figure in pre-war intelligence, his slow and haphazard recruitment in 1915 is scarcely believable.12
Like Lawrence, Pirie–Gordon and many others, Hogarth was part of a stock of travellers, newspapermen, archaeologists and businessmen on which the government called in an emergency. Their pre-war knowledge of the Middle East instantly qualified them as intelligence officers and they were hurriedly enlisted by the War Office and Admiralty. Their sudden precipitation into wartime intelligence bureaux was not a sign of any previous connections with espionage, but rather a token of a desperate official need to get together as many well-informed experts and linguists as possible.
Lawrence’s quest in the Lebanon and Syria in 1909 was for evidence of the region’s past, not its present or future. All travellers about to embark on a journey to a new country set out with some conceptions about what it will be like when they arrive. In June, when Lawrence joined the SS Magnolia bound for Port Said, he was similarly encumbered.
At the time, the Middle East was occupying more and more European attention. It was an area which seemed in the first stages of transition from supine backwardness to active modernity. Lawrence had been closely following events there for some time. In July 1908 he had read vague accounts in French journals of the Young Turk revolution in Constantinople and had pressed his parents to send him some hard news from British newspapers. His own political opinions were heterodox and fickle. ‘I am an anarchist,’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw in 1928, ‘convinced that there is no moral basis for the authority which some men assume.’ As a schoolboy and undergraduate, he was a Tory, an allegiance inherited from his father, who as an Irish landowner had every reason to detest the Liberals, because their laws had dissolved the economic and political power of his class. Politics were discussed in the Lawrence household and the tenor of Ned’s contributions may be judged from his remarks on Lloyd George’s Old Age Pension Bill written in 1908. For Lawrence, the measure was ‘an impudent pauperisation of all its old wasters, and penalisation of all its old workers’, which ignored the principles of political economy and had been devised to catch votes.
When confronted with the Orient, Lawrence’s political reactions were simple and conventional. As a European, he knew that he came from a continent whose achievements in every field of human activity entitled it to be called ‘civilised’. He was about to walk through a land, which for all its other attractions was ‘uncivilised’. Lawrence wrote home approvingly of the achievements of the American University at Beirut, where such modern subjects as Medicine, Pharmacy, Law, Agriculture and Dentistry formed the curriculum. There was praise too for the scattered American Protestant missions where on occasions he was a welltreated guest. He spent three days at Qalat al Husa with a ‘new man’, a Turkish provincial administrator whose conversation revealed him as ‘a–most–civilised–French–speaking-disciple-of-the Herbert–Spencer–Free–Masonic–Mohammedan-Young Turk’.
The traditional, backward Orient was despised. In Galilee, Lawrence contrasted what he imagined to have been the state of the country when Jesus and his disciples wandered through it and what he had just encountered. ‘They [Jesus and his disciples] did not come upon dirty and dilapidated Bedouin tents, with people calling to them to come in and talk, while miserable curs came snapping at their heels.’ Instead they enjoyed the luxuries of ‘the most Romanised province of Palestine’. The area cried out for civilisation. Lawrence was glad to report that rebirth was at hand when he described some of the recently established Zionist settlements, peopled by European Jewish immigrants. ‘The sooner the Jews farm it [Galilee] all the better: their colonies are bright spots in the desert.’
Beyond the major cities of Beirut and Aleppo, Lawrence discovered that there were some compensations for backwardness. The rural peasantry were open–handed and hospitable. ‘There are common people,’ he told his father, ‘each one ready to receive one for a night, and allow me to share in their meals: and without a thought of payment from a traveller on foot. It is pleasant, for they have an attractive kind of native dignity.’ On entering a Syrian house, Lawrence was greeted, sat on a thick quilt, asked many times about his health and sometimes given coffee. All villages had some arrangement for the accommodation of travellers. There were hans (inns), to which travellers had to bring their own bedding but where they received a meal from the owner, and village guest rooms which were often carpeted and in which counterpanes and cooking fuel were ready for the visitors. The counterpanes were a bane for Lawrence as they were always flea–ridden, even that offered by the Young Turk official. No payment was asked for use of the guest room, and when none was available a villager seemed always on hand to put a room in his house at the disposal of a visitor.
Lawrence’s route had been planned beforehand and fell into three stages. The first took him inland from Beirut towards Galilee and back. The second, which he began on 6 August, took him northwards to Tripoli, Latakia and Antakya (Antioch) and inland into the uplands of the Jebel Ansariye. This journey included the most formidable of all Crusader castles, Krak des Chevaliers, the Knights Hospitaller fortress where he spent three days. Then he plodded across country towards his next goal, Aleppo, where he arrived on 6 September. For part of this trek he had a guard of Turkish cavalrymen, who like everyone else were astonished to find a European travelling on foot. Lawrence discourteously refused a mount. ‘They couldn’t understand my prejudice against anything on four legs,’ he wrote to his mother. He had been walking for up to thirteen hours a day, so he said, and had gone without washing for ten.
Lawrence preferred to walk: he thought it the best means of getting to understand the lie of the land, which was essential if he was to explain the geographical siting of castles. These exploited naturally inaccessible places and they were placed strategically to guard frontiers or block access to territory. So Lawrence appreciated the strategic problems of the Crusaders; and he saved money. Furthermore, he believed that his gruelling regime had given him an immunity from that intermittent looseness of the bowels which normally bedevilled Europeans in the Middle East.
However, hitches were occurring. Although he had been well looked after at various missions along his route and found the largely farinaceous local diet to his taste, Lawrence was in a physically parlous condition by the time he reached Aleppo. Malaria, first picked up in southern France a year before, had sapped his strength and he was on the verge of a fourth bout when he got to Aleppo. He was therefore forced to take a carriage for the next leg of his journey and the return fare of £14 to Urfa knocked his budget askew. When he returned to Aleppo on 22 September he announced to his family, ‘I am coming home at once, for lack of money.’ His suit was falling apart, his boots had given up an unequal struggle and were leaking, and, in spite of regular treatment with boracic powder, his blisters and sores refused to heal.
He had shown considerable pluck, but his stamina, so rigorously built up and tested, had not matched the strain of his programme. He had covered 1,100 miles in eighty–three days, mostly on foot, had purchased twenty–four Hittite seals and examined three dozen castles. The last stage of his quest, which would have taken him south from Aleppo to the strongholds around the Dead Sea, had to be called off. Unlike his knightly heroes, he had failed to measure up to the demands of his undertaking and the blow to his self-esteem must have been heavy.
How could all this be explained when he returned to Oxford? On the road to Aleppo, Lawrence had been s
hot at by a mounted tribesman. He fired back with his Mauser and the tribesman’s horse bolted. Lawrence attached the wooden holster to the pistol as a stock and fired a second round at 800 yards which sent the man packing. He had tangled with a Tartar and a well-armed one at that. Such ambushes were common in this district and Europeans were cautioned to be wary of bandits. Lawrence was not, at least at Surruc on his way back from Urfa where his camera was stolen from his carriage. The previously invaluable iradehs failed to get a helpful response from the local police, whose lassitude Lawrence blamed on Ramadan.
The theft of the camera spawned several different stories which, when told to friends, revealed Lawrence’s forced abandonment of his expedition in a new light. On 24 September he wrote to Sir John Rhys, the Principal of Jesus, with an explanation as to why he would be starting term late. Pleading with him to keep the matter from his father, Lawrence said that he had been ‘robbed and rather smashed up’ in the past week. ‘The man was caught,’ Lawrence continued, thanks to the precious iradehs. Pirie–Gordon heard how Lawrence had been attacked by several Kurds who beat him, stole his clothes and camera, and left him for dead. As proof, Pirie–Gordon got his map back, its cover stained with blood.
Friends in Jesus were told how Lawrence had been stalked by a single robber, a bold fellow apparently undeterred by the massive Mauser, who struck him on the head with a rock. In another version of the tale, the robber grabbed a Colt revolver, which Lawrence was holding as he told the story, pressed the barrel against his head and squeezed the trigger. As luck would have it the safety catch was jammed, so the thief threw away the gun and ran off. Years later Robert Graves heard a further elaboration of the incident. This time Lawrence was bushwhacked close to the Euphrates, where he was looking for seals. His assailant stole his copper watch, thinking it gold, and fled when a shepherd appeared. Lawrence turned the tables on the rogue. Waving his iradehs, he called out the local police, who persuaded the elders from the robber’s village to hand him over with his loot. Later, to round off the story neatly, Lawrence had the thief working under him as a labourer at Karkamis.13
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