In case he hadn’t sufficiently made his point, Doughty continued, “The distances to be traversed are very great. You would have nothing to draw upon but the slight margin of strength which you bring with you from Europe. Insufficient food, rest and sleep would soon begin to tell.”
Such counsel might have dissuaded most people, but not Lawrence. For a young man already driven to test the very limits of his endurance, Doughty’s letter read like a dare.
HE CERTAINLY LOOKED the part. With his bull shoulders, calloused hands, and Teddy Roosevelt handlebar mustache, William Yale, the new engineering level-man hired on to work the Culebra Cut in the summer of 1908, blended right in with the tens of thousands of other workers who had descended upon the jungles of Central America. They had come to take part in the most ambitious construction project in the history of mankind, the building of the Panama Canal.
Few of his coworkers might have guessed that in fact William Yale had no engineering background at all; instead, he had obtained the position of level-man, and the premium salary it garnered, through the efforts of a well-connected college friend. Surely even fewer might have guessed that the twenty-one-year-old—by all accounts a tireless and uncomplaining worker—was operating in an environment utterly alien to him, that as a scion of one of America’s wealthiest and most illustrious families he had until very recently lived a life of privilege extraordinary even by the excessive standards of the day. To the American archetype of the self-made man, William Yale represented the dark and polar opposite, one born to tremendous advantage but who had lost it all in the blink of an eye.
Dating their arrival in America to the mid-1600s, the Yales of New England were a quintessential Yankee blueblood family, one that for 250 years had built an ever greater fortune through shipping, manufacturing, and exploiting all the riches the New World had to offer. True to their Presbyterian ethos, the Yales were also a family that believed in good works and education; in 1701, Elihu Yale, William’s great-great-uncle, helped found the university in New Haven that still bears the family name.
Born in 1887, William certainly appeared destined to live in the familial tradition. The third son of William Henry Yale, an industrialist and Wall Street speculator, he grew up on a four-acre estate in Spuyten Duyvil, the bluff at the southwestern tip of the Bronx in New York City. With its commanding views of both Manhattan and the Hudson River, Spuyten Duyvil had long been favored by New York’s moneyed class seeking to escape the noise and grime of the city, and the Yale estate was among the grandest. Through early childhood, William and his siblings, four brothers and two sisters, were educated by private tutors at the family mansion, took dance and social etiquette classes at Dodsworth’s, Manhattan’s preeminent dancing academy, and spent summers at the family’s vast forested estate in the Black River valley of upstate New York. Like his two older brothers before him, for high school William was shipped off to the prestigious Lawrenceville School outside Princeton.
But even from an early age, the Yale boys probably had broader horizons than most other male offspring of the New York pampered set. This was due to their father. Beyond being an ardent political supporter of Teddy Roosevelt—the Yales fit squarely into the progressive Republican mold—William Henry Yale also subscribed to Roosevelt’s notions of the ideal American man and of the dangers of “over-civilization,” code for effeminacy. The true man, in this worldview, was a rugged individualist, physically fit as well as intellectually cultured, as equally at home leading men into battle or shooting big game on the prairie as chatting with the ladies in the salon. To this end, William Henry frequently took his sons on extended trips into the American wilderness and ensured that they were just as adept at hunting, fishing, and trapping as in displaying the proper manners at a Spuyten Duyvil garden party.
The “Roosevelt Man” paradigm seemed to take especially firm root in his namesake third son. During his summer break from Lawrenceville in 1902, fourteen-year-old William traveled with his father to Cuba to see the sights of the island, recently “liberated” from Spain, as well as to visit the family’s newly acquired copper mines. Rather than immediately entering Yale University after high school—and there was never any question of which university all Yale boys would attend—William took a year off, and spent part of that time accompanying a wealthy friend and his family on a grand tour of the American West aboard their private railcar.
But much like T. E. Lawrence, when William Yale contemplated adulthood, he already regarded the conventional path so clearly delineated for him with an element of dread. “The routine life I had seen other young men take up seemed tasteless and meaningless,” he would later write. “The thought of doing over and over again the same thing day after day, year after year was maddening to me. How others lived in the same town they grew up, married girls they had known all their lives, lived in the houses their families owned, went down, day in and day out, to their father’s businesses, I could not understand.”
Then the dilemma was settled for him. In October 1907, a panic on Wall Street sparked a nationwide run on banks and nearly halved the value of the New York Stock Exchange in a matter of days. Among the hardest hit by the panic was the heavily leveraged William Henry Yale, whose enormous fortune was virtually wiped out. When William came home that Christmas, having just started his freshman year at Yale, his father delivered almost unimaginable news: the nineteen-year-old student would now have to work to help cover his educational expenses; he was essentially on his own.
William’s reaction to this news was mixed: shock, understandably, at the abrupt end to his privileged existence, but a shock leavened by a sense of liberation. Here was the chance to pursue the adventurous life he dreamed of. That summer, he took a leave from the university and shipped out to Panama.
That six-month sojourn in Central America proved a transformative experience. Instead of heirs and socialites, Yale’s companions now were a motley and licentious crew of international adventurers and construction vagabonds, rough-cut men who taught the fallen aristocrat how to work and how to drink; by Yale’s own account, it was only his mother’s puritanical indoctrination that enabled him to withstand the determined appeals of the female professionals at the Navajo Bar in Panama City and escape with his chastity intact.
But if Panama opened a door, it was still a daunting one to step through. Upon returning to New Haven and completing his degree, William Yale found himself in a quandary. “The bottom had dropped out of my world. To ever get to where I could marry and live the life I was brought up to expect seemed utterly hopeless. I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to make money.… What to do now? I was penniless, in debt, and knew nothing of the world, and at heart was intimidated by it.”
He would eventually find an answer to that question. It would take the form of a notice soliciting applicants to the “foreign service school” of the Standard Oil Company of New York.
ANYONE WHO HAPPENED to be crossing the searingly hot plain west of Aleppo in northern Syria in early September 1909 would have encountered a perplexing sight: a young, painfully thin Englishman, a rucksack slung over his shoulders, tromping along while close on his heels trailed a squadron of Turkish cavalry.
A few days earlier, T. E. Lawrence had arrived in the remote foothill town of Sahyun, there to quietly survey yet another Crusader castle, and the local Ottoman provincial governor, or kaimmakam, had been so amazed at the sight of the young traveler that he insisted on treating Lawrence as a visiting dignitary. That meant staying in the governor’s home and being lavishly waited upon, and it had also meant a personal bodyguard of cavalrymen when Lawrence set out for the five-day hike to Aleppo.
“It is rather amusing to contemplate a pedestrian guarded carefully by a troop of light horse [cavalry],” he wrote his family in describing the incident. “Of course everybody thinks I am mad to walk, and the escort offered me a mount on the average [of] once a half-hour; they couldn’t understand my prejudice against anything with four legs.”
&n
bsp; Lawrence’s walking tour of Syria that summer was comprised of two journeys. The first began in the coastal city of Beirut and consisted of a three-week jaunt south through the mountains of Lebanon to northern Palestine. After returning to Beirut and resting for a few days, he embarked on a far more elaborate and punishing trek north.
It was an adventure that changed his life. Everywhere the locals greeted him with both astonishment and overwhelming generosity. In village after village, residents would insist he eat with them, or stay the night as their guest, and despite their crushing poverty, very few would ever accept payment. “This is a glorious country for wandering in,” he wrote his father in mid-August, “for hospitality is something more than a name.”
His letters home conveyed a newfound happiness. In one letter to his mother at the end of August, he sounded like the modern college student who fancies that his travels have left him fundamentally transformed: “I will have such difficulty in becoming English again.”
The difference in Lawrence’s case was that this was to actually prove true.
Once back in Oxford for his senior year, Lawrence toiled on his thesis in the pleasant cottage his father had built for him in the garden of the Polstead Road home. The result carried the accurate if not exactly beckoning title The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the End of the XIIth Century.
The Oxford history department examiners were impressed enough by his original research—then, as now, most theses tended to be compendiums of others’ work—that Lawrence was awarded first-class honors, the highest scholastic ranking and one of only ten such awards given by the history school that year. The distinction greatly enhanced his chances of pursuing an academic career, his newfound goal, and this was further helped along when the university arranged a stipend for him to conduct postgraduate work. Perhaps stemming from his teenaged archaeological finds in the Oxford construction sites, Lawrence had long had a special attraction to pottery, and it was to this he turned in his postgraduate research. To be sure, studying “Medieval Lead-Glazed Pottery from the 11th to the 16th Centuries” sounded a lot less exciting than tramping about Syria, but it was a first step toward the life he envisioned for himself.
But it was not to be. In the autumn of 1910, just days after arriving in France to begin his pottery research, Lawrence learned that David Hogarth was about to leave for northern Syria, there to oversee the inauguration of an archaeological dig for the British Museum at the ancient ruins of Carchemish. Abandoning France, Lawrence hurried back to Oxford to try to convince Hogarth to take him along.
HE WAS A small, sickly child born into a pitiless family. Even before reaching adolescence, Curt Prüfer, the only son of a Berlin schoolteacher, had suffered through a litany of ailments that included tuberculosis, kidney disease, and diphtheria. It was a failed treatment for this last affliction that left him with his soft, feathery voice.
The boy’s frail health apparently did little to pull at the heartstrings of his parents, Carl and Agnes Prüfer. The father constantly criticized Curt for his purported laziness, while his mother rarely showed him affection or even attention. The emotional isolation didn’t end there. According to Prüfer biographer Donald McKale, Curt had no childhood friends, and his sole bond of attachment throughout growing up was to his one sibling, a sister several years his senior. Tellingly, considering the schoolyard taunts he undoubtedly suffered due to his voice, the adult Curt Prüfer’s favorite insult, one he would direct at entire nationalities and even his own married son, was the label of homosexual.
But in contrast to the spiritual poverty of his home life, Prüfer had been born into a fantastically exciting and tumultuous period in German history. In 1871, just ten years before his birth, Otto von Bismarck had capitalized on Prussia’s crushing victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War to tear up the centuries-old patchwork of German principalities and duchies and forge the modern German nation.
Under a state-directed corporatist structure, Germany swiftly went from a primarily agrarian economy to being one of the most industrialized nations on earth, linked from one end to the other by a modern network of railroads, canals, and carriageways. A series of workers’-rights legislations, as well as the world’s first national social welfare system, sent fractures through what had been one of the most rigidly class-stratified societies in Europe. Those fractures were widened further by the state’s massive expansion of higher education. Once almost solely the province of the very elite, university was now accessible to the middle class, so much so that by the turn of the century they comprised half of all college graduates.
Equally dramatic was the new image and prowess of Germany abroad. From a dizzying mélange of squabbling fiefdoms—a mélange that Europe’s established imperial powers had adroitly played off against one another for centuries—Germany was suddenly becoming an empire in its own right. Despite being a latecomer in the European “scramble for Africa,” by the mid-1880s it had established colonies in western, southern, and eastern Africa; in a fit of grandiosity, it even planted its flag in the South Pacific island of Samoa, almost precisely the farthest spot from Germany on the planet.
But if Bismarck created the modern German state, it was another man who would truly catapult it onto the global stage, and fire the passions of young Germans like Curt Prüfer in the process. In 1888, Wilhelm II, the twenty-nine-year-old eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria of England, ascended to the German throne. With a fondness for military uniforms and bellicose language, as well as an undying resentment of the other European royal families, the young kaiser was determined to make his nation not just a regional power but a world one. This aggressiveness was of limited concern in other European capitals so long as the true levers of German authority lay in the steady hands of Chancellor Bismarck—within the incestuous orbit of European royalty, Wilhelm had long been pegged as an emotionally unstable but controllable hothead—but of considerably greater concern when Wilhelm forced Bismarck from office in 1890 and assumed autocratic powers. Absent the calming influence of the Iron Chancellor, and surrounding himself with palace sycophants and the Prussian military elite, Wilhelm nursed himself—and his subjects—on a particularly toxic nationalist mythology rooted in both a sense of victimization and superiority: that throughout history, Germany had been denied its rightful “place in the sun” through the treachery of others, that this colossal injustice was now to be remedied, through force of arms if necessary.
For a boy like Curt Prüfer coming of age at this juncture, it could almost be said that the new Germany created him. By the time he entered secondary school in 1896, a new national curriculum had been introduced, one that broke with the European classicist model in favor of one preaching nationalist pride and the primacy of the state and the emperor. It found a fervent disciple in the lonely, sickly boy from Berlin. Soundly rejecting his father’s neosocialist liberalism, Curt also rebelled against his parents’ narrow petit-bourgeois horizons, in particular their desire that he follow in Carl Prüfer’s footsteps and become a schoolteacher. Instead, this German “New Man”—exceptionally bright and driven despite his father’s harsh estimation—imagined a wholly different life for himself, and where he saw that life taking him was east.
Part of that attraction may have stemmed from the political currents of the day. Among all the jockeying European powers at the close of the nineteenth century, there was a growing tendency to regard diplomacy as a zero-sum game—any accord between one’s competitors translated as a direct loss or threat to oneself—but nowhere was this tendency more pronounced than in Wilhelm’s paranoia-tinged Germany. Throughout the 1890s, with growing signs of amity between France, Great Britain, and Russia, an amity spurred in no small part by alarm over Germany’s rapid militarization, talk of “encirclement” increasingly came into vogue in Berlin. To escape this encirclement by its imperial rivals—France and Great Britain to one side, Russia to the other—a boxed-in Germany needed to look beyond for economic and pol
itical expansion, and the region holding the greatest promise was the Ottoman and Muslim East. This notion was greatly strengthened in 1898 when the kaiser made a triumphant tour of the Ottoman world and was royally feted wherever he went. For patriotic young Germans, the Near East was suddenly a beckoning frontier.
But for Curt Prüfer, probably the greater attraction derived from the exotic. At various times throughout the nineteenth century, archaeological discoveries in the Near East had spawned intense fascination among the European public, and probably nowhere had this been more true than in Germany. Dating back to Karl Lepsius’s expeditions to the Egyptian pyramids in the 1840s and continuing through Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s, German archaeologists had been at the forefront of exploration in the region, and responsible for many of the greatest finds. By the 1880s, with German scientists excavating burial tombs in the Luxor region of Upper Egypt, and Adolf Erman breaking the codes of pharaonic hieroglyphics at the University of Berlin, a new wave of popular interest had ushered in the so-called golden age of Egyptology. The craze captivated the young Prüfer much the way the dawning of the Space Age would enthrall a later generation. Even as a very young boy, he devoured the tales of adventure and discovery coming out of the Near East, and dreamed of the circumstances that might take him there.
That may have remained the stuff of childhood fantasy if not for Curt Prüfer’s possession of a singular talent, a somewhat curious one in light of his speech difficulties. He was a prodigy when it came to mastering foreign languages, one of those rare people who could go from utter unfamiliarity to near fluency in a matter of months. He had thoroughly mastered French and English in secondary school, but as a young man he set his sights much further afield.
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