Lawrence was the chance witness to a society in its last days. In 1908 the Young Turk coup had ushered in an era which promised modernisation and the general application of the democratic ideal. Lawrence had already learned something of the dreams of the new movement during his 1909 visit. His charming Arab tutor, Miss Akle, told him more about the aspirations of her people, how they were groping towards a historic, national identity and their hopes for a partnership with the Turks or even independence. Even in the backwater of Jerablus there were inklings of the ferment and tension created by new ideas and awakened hopes. These were always more detectable in the cities and towns of the coast, but they crept slowly inland. In June 1911, while Lawrence was digging at Karkamis, the consular dragoman at Birecik reported an upswell in restlessness among the local Kurds and Armenians. There was also for the first time organised political-activity in the shape of a newly formed Kurdish Reactionary Club.6
As a highly intelligent young man whose interest in his surroundings and their inhabitants was growing, Lawrence sensed the forces of historic change which were spreading through Syria even though his immediate experience of them was limited. His stamping ground around Karkamis was largely populated by illiterate peasant farmers and nomads who were only dimly aware of the world beyond their villages and camps. The ignorance of rural Arabs startled a Jewish conscript in the Turkish army who found that ‘Napoleon Bonaparte and Queen Victoria are still living figures to them.’ In normal circumstances, Lawrence’s feelings towards such people and his reactions to the forces which were about to transform their lives would have been unimportant. After all he had come to Syria as a scholar whose primary concern was the country’s distant past. But the outbreak of war turned him into one of the gravediggers of the Ottoman empire and, in time, he occupied a position in which he had considerable influence over the future of its former provinces. What he had seen and learned in Syria suddenly assumed a formidable importance.
Between 1911 and 1914, Lawrence was willingly, even enthusiastically, drawn into the complex and turbulent political life of Syria. As a medievalist, he would have recognised many features of Syrian life which were the same as those of medieval Europe. Rural and desert society was still dominated by feudal sheiks, who had armed retinues, shepherds and tenantry and levied khawah (protection money) on the peasantry. The ancient rights of these autocrats were underwritten by the Ottoman government, which allowed them to collect official taxes and levy private imposts on caravans and traders who crossed their lands. Lawrence had had his first, noisy introduction to this system at work in 1909 when, as a guest in a Lebanese village, he had been woken by his hosts and asked to keep watch against marauding landlords who were after their cut of the local harvest. At Karkamis in May 1912 he discovered that ‘Our donkey–boy till last week was only getting 15 of the 45 piastres we pay him: the percentage of the sheik accounted for the rest: since he was a boy and helpless.’
Helplessness was the common condition of most Syrians. As an Englishman, Lawrence was repelled by the unfreedom of the Jerablus peasantry, who endured ‘the hideous grind of forced labour’ or were fettered to debts they could never repay. His reaction was true to the chivalric code of his warrior heroes, which enjoined the knight to protect those too weak to fend for themselves. His situation may also have reminded him of that shared by so many young English heroes of the G.A. Henty adventures he had read as a boy. In foreign lands and on the empire’s frontiers, these stout fellows stood up for the downtrodden and carried with them their country’s principles of fair play and honest dealing. Faced with the wretchedness of the Jerablus peasantry, victims of landlords and moneylenders and, from 1912, the bullying of German overseers, Lawrence cast himself in the role of a guardian justiciar. When news reached him in December 1911 that the diggings at Karkamis would be reopened, he looked forward to making himself the local squire. ‘I feel on my native heath,’ he told his parents, ‘and am on the pitch of settling in a new Carcemish as Sheik.’ Six months later, this ambition was within his grasp, for the British Museum committed itself to buying more land on the site. Lawrence wanted to make these acres an estate which would offer sanctuary to his labourers. ‘Our workmen can move on to it, and live away from the clutches of their sheiks and mukhtars,’ and in his absence, Haj Wahed, a trusted cook, would act as land agent.
Another contemporary traveller in this region had been pleased to find that the ‘Ingleez’ enjoyed a high prestige among the peasantry. Lawrence’s wild behaviour, which included organising his labourers into competing teams and firing his revolver into the air when one had made a find, made the Jerablus Arabs think him ‘mad’, but they also gave him unstinted admiration and affection. His brother Will, who visited him during the summer of 1913, described him as ‘a great lord in this place’. Like all sympathetic squires, Lawrence was a good listener to his tenants’ stories. The conversation of uneducated Arabs was confined to recitals of family connections, sagas of blood feuds, and religion. Pedigrees and tales of rivalries and skirmishes were the stock-in-trade of Lawrence’s medieval romancers, so he was fascinated by all that he heard. He also came to appreciate the quality of the storytellers, who were ‘very curious and very simple, and yet with a fund of directness and child-humour about them that is very fine’. They were not, he was glad to say, like the Egyptian workmen he had met when digging with Petrie, who presumed too much and lacked deference. There was always a gulf between Lawrence and his protégés.7
Lawrence was also drawn into the affairs of the nomadic Kurds. A race with their own language, they occupied a region which spread from northern Syria across eastern Turkey and northern Iraq and over the Persian border. Their tribal organisation, unlike that of the Syrian Arabs, was still more or less intact. Like other races within the Ottoman empire, the Kurds were feeling their way towards a national identity and thinking of future independence. There was a sprinkling of Kurdish labourers at Karkamis, and by 1913 Lawrence had won the friendship and respect of the local Kurdish chief, Busawari Agha, and was starting to learn Kurdish.
Traditional Kurdish life, like that of the nomadic Bedu of the deserts south and east of Karkamis, was little touched either by regulations framed by the government in Constantinople or by the twentieth century. Tribal feuding and stock rustling were endemic in a region of chronic instability. In May 1911 a Jerablus village sheik had kidnapped a young girl and Lawrence watched her kin leave the diggings, pick up their guns and ride off in pursuit. He had also to be careful at the excavations to keep apart men from feuding families, and in June 1913 was forced to lock quarrelling workmen in his darkroom until they came to their senses. The Kurds were more fearsome. In June 1912, Lawrence saw a body of Kurds launch a halfhearted attack on some villagers which was repelled after a harmless exchange of revolver fire. During the autumn there were rumours that a larger tribal force was ready to attack and loot the railway works. There had been a poor harvest that year and, early in 1913, Lawrence and Woolley reported to Raff Fontana, Consul in Aleppo, that local Kurdish chiefs were planning a plundering raid on the city. Lawrence was sent down to Beirut to assist two naval officers from HMS Duke of Edinburgh smuggle ten rifles to the Consulate for use in the event of an attack. Whether this precaution was against the Kurds, who never turned up, or Pan–Islamic demonstrators incensed by Turkish setbacks in the Balkan Wars is not clear either from Fontana’s despatches or from his wife’s memories of the event.8
Later in the year, neutral Karkamis was the scene for a reconciliation between emissaries from Buswari Agha and a rival which Woolley and Lawrence supervised. The choice of place owed something to the desire of some Kurdish sheiks for closer relations with Britain. They were impelled by contradictory motives. If, as many suspected, the Ottoman empire was about to fall apart, the Kurds needed friends and the best candidates were Russia, whose empire bordered Turkey in the East and whose influence was creeping into northern Persia, or Britain, which dominated southern Persia and the Persian Gulf. On the other h
and, if the new rulers of Turkey achieved their goals of rejuvenation and modernisation, which would make the Ottoman empire the ‘Japan of the East’, then the power of Kurdish sheiks and their tribal customs would be swept away. A party of pro-British Kurdish chiefs from the Turco-Persian border region called on Fontana on their way back from Mecca and asked him to tell his government that they would ‘hail British occupation as a blessing’. A fortnight later, on 27 March 1913, he reported a deputation of Arab sheiks who told him that they were convinced that there was ‘no hope of improvement under the Ottoman Government’. Knowing ‘that those of the faith in Egypt and India enjoy a Government preferable to this’, their people ‘were praying for a British Government in the country’.9
Behind such pleading were the fears of traditionalist Muslims that new provisions for political equality would give rights and privileges to the Greek and Armenian Christian minorities. Shortly before Lawrence had arrived in Beirut in 1909, there had been massacres of Armenians to the north in Adana which the local British Vice-Consul, Major Doughty-Wylie VC (a future intelligence colleague), had tried to stop by taking command of the Turkish garrison. The wars in Libya and the Balkans were widely interpreted as acts of Christian aggression against Islam. Lawrence was conscious of the tension during his walk through eastern Syria in the summer of 1911 and thought it imprudent to ask for food from Muslim households. Religious disturbances flickered on during 1912 and 1913, although insignificant in scale compared to the officially backed genocide which would be launched against the Armenians by Mehmed Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, in January 1915.
As a neutral Englishman, Lawrence was able to have contacts with both Kurdish and Armenian nationalists, and he had learned something about Arab national dreams from Miss Akle. He was broadly sympathetic to these movements, and Woolley remembered him as an ‘enthusiast’ for Syrian nationalism. ‘Down with the Turks!’ he proclaimed to Mrs Rieder of the Jeblé mission school in April 1913, just after their defeat by the Balkan League. ‘Their disappearance would mean a chance for the Arabs, who were at any rate once not incapable of good government.’10 He offered no hint as to whether he believed this facility was recoverable.
Hogarth would have seen that self-determination for Arabs and Kurds had obvious drawbacks. He believed that backward peoples were automatically excluded from democratic processes, which he viewed with much distaste even in Britain. His Coriolanus-like disdain for the hustings made him decline Sir Mark Sykes’s suggestion that he stand as Tory candidate for Oxford in December 1919.11 Taking a historical perspective, Hogarth argued in The Ancient East (1914) that the Middle East, ‘lost to the west’ with the collapse of the Roman empire, would inevitably return to European domination.12 Although Lawrence may have succumbed to the emotional appeal of local nationalism, his background inclined him towards Hogarth’s view. Perhaps as a consequence of the ideas passed down to him from his father, Lawrence was an instinctive paternalist. The self-appointed British ‘Qonsolos’ (Consul) at Karkamis who settled tribal disputes and spoke to the Turkish Commissioner in Birecik ‘in a lordly fashion’ saw himself as agent of a benevolent imperialism. He was, in his own words, ‘the protector–of–the–poor–and–enemy–of–allthe–rich–and–in–authority’. Knight errant and umpire combined, Lawrence brought peace and justice to the oppressed and fulfilled one of the highest ideals of the late-Victorian and Edwardian empire. Whether or not his behaviour at Karkamis contributed to the feeling among some Kurds and Arabs that they would be better off under British rule is not known. Nevertheless, in April 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, had to deny publicly that there were agents abroad in Syria canvassing local support for British annexation. 13
As patron of the natives of Jerablus and its environs and the upholder of British principles of fair–dealing and justice, Lawrence saw it as his first duty to keep all foreign influences at bay. In day–to–day terms this involved taking a strong line with the team of German engineers working a few hundred yards away on their railway bridge. Lawrence found them ‘rather unpleasant creatures’. One, a senior engineer called Contzen, he told Robert Graves, was particularly odious. He had a fleshy bull’s neck which overhung his collar; this was of course the hallmark of the stereotype Prussian officer which Walt Whitman had called ‘the mark of the beast’. Together Contzen and his colleagues drank too much rakis, contaminated the village of Jerablus with what Lawrence called ‘the sweepings of Aleppo’, and treated every native with brutal contempt.
There were between 1912 and 1914 a number of clashes which had started with the row over whether part of the site would be covered with engine sheds and workshops. Lawrence and Woolley always took the labourers’ part against their employers and their guards. In one incident, which Lawrence recounted to Graves, he took up the cudgels on behalf of his servant Dahoum after the boy had asked the Germans for back pay and received a beating for his presumption. Lawrence demanded and got an apology after threatening to thrash the man responsible. Prestige rather than legal principle seemed to have been at stake for, when Lawrence caught some dynamite poachers on the Euphrates, he urged the local police to have them flogged. British prestige soared in the neighbourhood in May 1914 when Woolley and he restored order after an unpleasant affray between the Germans, their Circassian and Turkish guards and local villagers and Kurds. The trouble started when a Circassian guard shot dead a Kurd during a quarrel over unpaid wages. Site workers seized guns, pickaxes and hatchets and attacked the German offices and there was some shooting in which Woolley was nearly hit. Between them, Woolley and Lawrence calmed the natives and later used their influence with the Kurds to arrange payments of blood money for the man killed and others wounded.
Relations with the Germans were not always acerbic. Some engineers were invited to the archaeologists’ lodgings and borrowed books. Lawrence entertained the agreeable Heinrich Meissner, who had built the Damascus–to–Medina line and directed the operations of the Baghdad railway. Another, more sinister guest at Karkamis was the Freiherr Max von Oppenheim, a Bavarian Jewish millionaire who divided his time between archaeology and political intrigue. ‘I hardly was polite,’ remarked Lawrence after the meeting, ‘but was interesting instead.’ Oppenheim could not be trusted and was under partial surveillance by consular dragomen. In October 1911 he was purchasing land for ‘colonisation’ near Tel Halaf on the Baghdad line and bribing Arab sheiks near Mosul. No doubt Oppenheim thought Lawrence was a man who should be watched. He constantly meddled in the affairs of the German railway builders and generally behaved in a manner which suggested that his object was to demonstrate to the local Kurds and Arabs that Britain, not Germany, was their true friend.
For Lawrence, the railway symbolised the penetration of Syria by foreign influences and the wider forces of change which were altering the way of life of its people. He resented both. The Germans whom he encountered at Karkamis represented a country which was fast developing close political and economic ties with the Ottoman empire. Even so they were comparative latecomers on the Middle Eastern scene and in 1914 their share of Ottoman trade was still a fraction of Britain’s. In terms of finance, Turkey was beholden to France, which in 1914 had 800 million francs (£40 million) invested in the empire and controlled 60 per cent of the Ottoman national debts. Since the 1840s, France had followed a programme of systematic infiltration of the Lebanon and Syria through state-subsidised mission schools. By 1914 French schools had a roll of 100,000 pupils, a tenth of the entire school population of the Ottoman empire. This attempt to dominate the region’s culture and capture the minds of its middle classes through an educational monopoly had been devised to yield political returns.14
France sought to enter Syria through the bourse and the classroom and by 1912, when the Foreign Minister Cambon believed that the Ottoman empire was on its last legs, prepared for annexation. A department was set up in the Quai d‘Orsay to draw up plans for occupation and, in February 1914, a conference of French and German b
usinessmen discussed economic partition of the region. France came out of it rather well with a promise of paramountcy in Syria, while Germany went away free to develop concessions along the track of the Baghdad railway. British influence in the Persian Gulf was to remain unchallenged. In the House of Commons, Sir Mark Sykes, who knew the area intimately, was indignant. ‘Cosmopolitan harpies,’ he announced, ‘are now preparing in the most legitimate way to rob the inhabitants [of the Ottoman empire] under the guise of introducing them to the benefits of civilization.’15
If he read an account of Sykes’s speech, either in The Times or in the Parliamentary summaries in Punch, which was regularly posted to Karkamis, Lawrence would have applauded. After six months in Syria, he had changed his tune. He had now utterly abandoned his earlier belief that its people needed improvement and civilisation. In June 1912 he had written from Karkamis:
Fortunately there is no foreign influence as yet in this district: if only you had seen the ruination caused by the French influence, and to a lesser degree by the American, you would never wish it extended. The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanised Arab is appalling. Better a thousand times, the Arab untouched. The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had very much better learn, for in everything but wits and knowledge, the Arab is generally the better man of the two.
Although the previous January he had accepted the hospitality of the American mission school at Jeblé and would do so again in the summer of 1912, he confided his contempt for such institutions to Woolley.
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