But that had been then. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had long been in a state of seemingly terminal decline. The proverbial “sick man of Europe,” its epitaph had begun to be written as far back as the 1850s, and in the intervening years no fewer than five of the imperial powers of Europe had taken turns snatching away great swaths of its territory. That the Ottomans had managed to avoid complete destruction thus far was due both to their skill at playing off those competing European powers and to no small measure of improbable good luck. In 1914, however, all that was about to change. By guessing wrong—very wrong—in the calamitous war just then descending, the Ottomans would not only bring on their own doom but unleash forces of such massive disintegration that the world is still dealing with the repercussions a century later.
Chapter 2
A Very Unusual Type
Can you make room on your excavations next winter for a young Oxford graduate, T. Lawrence, who has been with me at Carchemish? He is a very unusual type, and a man whom I feel quite sure you would approve of and like.… I may add that he is extremely indifferent to what he eats or how he lives.
DAVID HOGARTH TO EGYPTOLOGIST FLINDERS PETRIE, 1911
I think it time I dedicated a letter to you,” Thomas Edward Lawrence wrote his father on August 20, 1906, “although it does not make the least difference in style, since all my letters are equally bare of personal information. The buildings I try to describe will last longer than we will, so it is only fitting that they should have the greater space.”
True to his word, Lawrence spent the rest of that letter imparting absolutely no information about himself, not even bothering to mention how he had spent his eighteenth birthday four days earlier. Instead, he used the space to describe in minute detail the structural peculiarities of a fourteenth-century castle he had just visited.
Lawrence, on recess from the Oxford High School for Boys, was spending that summer bicycling through northwestern France. The bicycle had only recently become widely available to the European general public, a result of design innovations and mass production, and it had sparked something of a craze among the British middle class for cycling tours of the European countryside. Lawrence’s trip was on a wholly different scale, however: a nearly thousand-mile trek that took him to most every notable castle and cathedral in the Normandy region.
The notes he took of these places formed the basis of Lawrence’s letters to his family back in Oxford. While he often prefaced them with brief expressions of concern for his mother’s purportedly frail health, the chief characteristic of most of his correspondence was its utter impersonality, the same disquisitional tone as adopted in that to his father.
In some respects, this element of emotional constriction was probably not unusual for a member of a British middle-class family at the end of the Victorian age. It may have been heightened in the Lawrence household by its male preponderance—a family of five boys and no girls—but this was a segment of society that prized self-control and understatement, where children were expected to be studious and respectful, and where a parent’s greatest gift to those children was not an indulgent affection but rather a sober religious grounding and a good education. It was also a segment of society that held to a simple and comfortable worldview. While radical political ideas were starting to find flower among the working class, the British middle class still adhered to a social hierarchy based less on attained wealth than on ancestry and accent, a caste system that rigidly dictated nearly every aspect of social life—in some respects, even more rigidly than a half century before. If stultifying, this stratification also meant that everyone knew his place, the station in life to which he might reasonably aspire. To the degree possible, social and economic advancement was obtained through the “godly virtues” of modesty, self-reliance, diligence, and thrift.
Perhaps the least questioned tenet of the time was the notion that the British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment—whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three—to the world’s less fortunate cultures and races. While this conviction extended to all segments of British society, it had special resonance for the middle class, since it was from precisely this social stratum that the chief custodians of empire—its midlevel military field officers and colonial administrators—were drawn. This, too, undoubtedly contributed to an emotional distance in such families; from the time of their children’s birth, parents had to steel themselves to the likelihood that some of their offspring, especially the males, might ship out to a remote outpost of empire, not to be seen again for decades, if ever.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the British middle-class generation coming of age in the early 1900s was marked by a certain blitheness, so much so that in recalling their growing up many years later, one of Lawrence’s brothers could write without a hint of irony, “We had a very happy childhood, which was never marred by a single quarrel between any of us.”
But in at least one respect, there was something altogether unusual about the Lawrence family on Oxford’s Polstead Road, and it undoubtedly added to the emotional austerity in that household. Quite unbeknownst to the neighbors and to most of their own children, Thomas and Sarah Lawrence were harboring a scandalous secret: they were essentially living as fugitives. The key to that secret began with the family surname, which wasn’t really Lawrence.
Thomas Lawrence’s real name was Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, and in his prior incarnation he had been a prominent member of the Anglo-Irish landed aristocracy. After being educated at Eton, the future baronet had returned to Ireland and, in the early 1870s, took up the pleasant role of gentleman farmer of his family’s estate in County Westmeath. He married a woman from another wealthy Anglo-Irish family, with whom he soon had four daughters.
But Chapman’s gilded existence began to unravel when he started an affair with the governess to his young daughters, a twenty-four-year-old Scottish woman named Sarah Junner. By the time Chapman’s wife learned of the affair in early 1888, Sarah already had one child with Thomas—an infant son secreted in a rented apartment in Dublin—and a second was on the way. Refused a divorce by his wife, the aristocrat was forced to choose between his two families.
Given the laws and moral strictures of the Victorian era, the consequences of that choice could hardly have been more profound. If he opted to stay with Sarah Junner, Thomas Chapman would not only be stripped of most of his family inheritance, but his four daughters would have great difficulty ever marrying due to the taint of family scandal. Worse was what would lie in store for his and Sarah’s offspring. As illegitimates, they would be effectively barred from many of the better schools and higher professions that, had they been legally born to the Chapman name, would be their birthright. Certainly, the most prudent course was for Thomas to bundle Sarah back to her native Scotland with a supporting stipend for herself and her children, a rather common arrangement of the day when servant girls got “into trouble” with their masters. Instead, Chapman chose to stay with Sarah.
After renouncing his claim to the family fortune in favor of his younger brother, Thomas left Ireland with Sarah in mid-1888 for the anonymity of a small village in northern Wales called Tremadoc. There, the couple assumed the alias of Sarah’s mother’s maiden name, Lawrence, and in August of that year Sarah gave birth to their second child, a son they named Thomas Edward.
But Wales brought the couple no peace of mind. Getting by on a modest annuity from the Chapman family estate but living in constant fear that they might one day encounter someone who knew them from their former lives, the Lawrences began a furtive, peripatetic existence: Tremadoc was soon given up for an even more remote village in northern Scotland, then it was on to the Isle of Man, followed by a couple of years in a small French town, followed by two more years in a secluded hunting lodge on the south coast of England. Compounding the isolation in th
ese places—in each, the Lawrences rented homes on village outskirts or surrounded by high stone walls—Thomas severed ties to nearly all his former friends, while Sarah rarely left the security and anonymity of the family home.
“You can imagine how your mother and I have suffered all these years,” Thomas Lawrence would confide in a posthumous letter to his sons, “not knowing what day we might be recognized by some one and our sad history published far and wide.”
In light of this driving fear, the Lawrences’ decision to move to Oxford in 1896 must have been a downright harrowing one. For the first time, the couple would not only be living in the center of a large town but, given Thomas’s aristocratic and educational background, in a place where it was very likely they would cross paths with someone from their past. But against this was the opportunity for their sons—now grown to four in number, with a fifth on the way—to receive a good education, maybe even to ultimately win admission to Oxford University, and so the Lawrences took the gamble. The price for this heightened exposure, however, was a family drawn even tighter into itself, the boys’ lives circumscribed in comparison to those of their classmates, but for reasons those boys couldn’t begin to fathom. All except Thomas Edward, that is. With the move to Oxford, the eight-year-old was now settling into the sixth home of his young life, and at some point during his first years at Polstead Road he partially unraveled the family secret. He kept the information to himself, however, never confronting his parents nor confiding in any of his brothers.
At the Oxford High School for Boys, Lawrence was known as an exceptionally bright but quiet student, one for whom team sports held no appeal and who, if not engaged in a solitary pursuit, preferred the company of his brothers or just a very small group of close friends. His bookish side—he had been a voracious reader even as a young child—was offset by a love of bicycle riding and a fondness for practical jokes. But there was something else as well. By early adolescence, “Ned,” as he was known to family and friends, had developed the habit of constantly testing the limits of his endurance, whether in how far or fast he could bicycle or how long he could go without food or sleep or water. This wasn’t the usual stuff of boyhood self-testing, but protracted ordeals that, through a kind of iron will, Ned could sustain to the point of collapse. So pronounced was this tendency that even his headmaster in the fourth form (equivalent to American eighth grade) took notice: “He was unlike the boys of his time,” Henry Hall wrote in a remembrance of Lawrence, “for even in his schooldays he had a strong leaning toward the Stoics, an apparent indifference towards pleasure or pain.”
Some of this may have stemmed from an increasingly severe home environment. As the Lawrence boys grew older, Sarah, the disciplinarian of the family, became both more religious and more given to physical punishment. These were not mere spankings, but rather protracted whippings with belts and switches, and in the remembrance of the Lawrence boys, Ned was by far her most frequent target. It established a disturbing pattern between mother and son. That Ned made a point of never crying or asking for leniency during these whippings—to the contrary, he seemed to derive satisfaction from his ability to display no emotion whatsoever—often had the effect of making the punishments worse, so much so that on several occasions the normally cowed Thomas Lawrence intervened to put a stop to them.
At around the age of fifteen, Ned abruptly stopped growing. With his brothers all eventually surpassing him in height, he became acutely aware of his shortness—variously pegged at between five foot three and five foot five—and this seemed to deepen an already pronounced shyness. About the same time, he developed a fascination with the tales of medieval knights, and with archaeology. He began taking long bicycle trips to churches in the English countryside, where he would conduct brass rubbings of memorial plaques. With his best friend of the time, he scoured the construction sites of new buildings going up in Oxford in search of old relics, and came upon a good number of them. These finds, mostly glass and pottery shards from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, soon led Ned to the Ashmolean Museum in central Oxford.
With the distinction of being the oldest public museum in Britain, and with an emphasis on charting the confluence of Eastern and Western cultures, the Ashmolean was to play a transformative role in Lawrence’s life. Encouraged by its curators to whom he brought his construction site finds, the teenager soon became a familiar figure around the museum, dropping in after school, helping with odd chores on the weekends. For Lawrence, the Ashmolean became a window onto the world that lay beyond Oxford, its artifacts giving physicality to all the places and civilizations he constantly read about. Testament to his fascination with the past, as well as his already fierce streak of self-sufficiency, was that extended bicycle tour of the castles and cathedrals of Normandy in the summer of 1906.
Earning high marks at high school, in the autumn of 1907 Lawrence was admitted to Jesus College of Oxford University, there to specialize in history. With an abiding interest in both military history and the Middle Ages, he fashioned a thesis focusing on the architecture of medieval castles and fortifications. To that end, for the summer of 1908 recess, he plotted a journey that dwarfed his earlier excursion to Normandy, an elaborate twenty-four-hundred-mile bicycle trek that would take him to nearly every significant such structure across the breadth of France. Staying in cheap pensions, or camping in the rough, he routinely pedaled more than a hundred miles a day as he went from one ancient castle or battlement to the next. At each, he took photographs, made sketches, and wrote up exhaustive notes before getting back on his bicycle and pedaling on.
Initially, his letters back to Polstead Road assumed the same dry, even tedious tone of those from his earlier travels. But then something changed. It happened on August 2, 1908, when Lawrence reached the village of Aigues-Mortes and he saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. In the letter home describing that day, Lawrence displayed an exuberance and sense of wonder that was quite out of character.
“I bathed today in the sea,” he wrote, “the great sea, the greatest in the world; you can imagine my feelings.… I felt that at last I had reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East—Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete—they were all there, and all within reach of me.… Oh I must get down here—farther out—again! Really this getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance; I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow.”
It was almost as if he were describing a religious epiphany. In a way, he was.
When Lawrence returned to Oxford and his studies that autumn, he began to hatch a new—and infinitely more ambitious—journey, one that would take him to the furthermost region of those he had contemplated that day in Aigues-Mortes. Among the first to hear of this new scheme was a man named David Hogarth.
A noted archaeologist who had worked and traveled extensively in the Near East, Hogarth had only recently taken up the position of director, or keeper, of the Ashmolean Museum. From the Ashmolean’s assistant curators he had undoubtedly heard mention of T. E. Lawrence—that the shy Oxford student had been a fixture around the museum since his early teens, that he showed a keen curiosity in archaeological work—but this did not at all prepare Hogarth for the diminutive figure ushered into his office one day in January 1909.
After his tour of the castles in France, Lawrence had now radically expanded the idea for his senior thesis at Oxford. Put simply, there just wasn’t much new to be said or discovered by examining European medieval fortifications in isolation, whereas one of the enduring mysteries in the study of military architecture was the degree to which innovations in medieval battlements were of Western or Eastern origin: had the Christian Crusaders learned from their Muslim enemies while invading the Holy Land, or had the Muslims copied from the Crusaders? As Lawrence explained to Hogarth, what he proposed was a comprehensive survey of the Crusader castles of the Syrian Near East—and, in typical Lawrence fashion, not merely a visit to some of the more notable ones, but a tour
of practically all of them. Lawrence planned to make this trek during the next Oxford summer recess, and alone.
Hogarth, already thrown by Lawrence’s modest stature—he was now twenty but could easily pass for fifteen—was aghast at the plan. The expedition Lawrence proposed meant a journey of well over a thousand miles across deserts and rugged mountain ranges, where whatever roads and trails existed had only deteriorated since Roman times. What’s more, summer was the absolute worst time to travel in Syria, a season when temperatures routinely reached 120 degrees in the interior. As Hogarth recounted the conversation to a Lawrence biographer, when he tried to diplomatically raise these issues, he was met with a steely resolve.
“I’m going,” Lawrence said.
“Well, have you got the money?” Hogarth asked. “You’ll want a guide and servants to carry your tent and baggage.”
“I’m going to walk.”
The scheme was becoming more preposterous all the time. “Europeans don’t walk in Syria,” Hogarth explained. “It isn’t safe or pleasant.”
“Well,” Lawrence said, “I do.”
Startled by the young man’s brusque determination, Hogarth implored him to at least seek the counsel of a true expert. This was Charles Montagu Doughty, an explorer who had traversed much of the region Lawrence proposed to visit, and whose book Travels in Arabia Deserta was considered the definitive travelogue of the time. When contacted, Doughty was even more dismissive of the plan than Hogarth.
“In July and August the heat is very severe by day and night,” he wrote Lawrence, “even at the altitude of Damascus (over 2,000 feet). It is a land of squalor, where a European can find little refreshment. Long daily marches on foot a prudent man who knows the country would, I think, consider out of the question. The populations only know their own wretched life and look upon any European wandering in their country with at best a veiled ill will.”
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