Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  It may have been his feeling for Dahoum which prompted him to exchange clothes with him. By slipping into his dishdasha he could magically become Dahoum, become for a moment the innocent and ignorant ‘savage’ living close to the earth, become the long-admired craftsman of the medieval era, inhabiting a pre-Renaissance, pre-rational world. Lawrence, whose inner emptiness prompted him to take on the characteristics of others he met, was to spend his life searching for alternative selves. In Dahoum, he discovered his most potent alter ego – a persona he could step into and out of as he wished. At last, the obsessions of his youth – the medieval, the Morrisian fantasy – began to coalesce in the overwhelming fascination and delight of being that ‘baron in the feudal system’, a European in the East: ‘I don’t think anyone who has tasted the East as I have would give it up halfway,’ he wrote.20 His happiness made him oblivious to or uncaring about the scandal he was provoking, especially in the breast of the committed Evangelist Miss Holmes, who had welcomed Lawrence first as a devoted fellow Christian, a member of an Evangelical family, who in 1909 had waxed enthusiastically about the triumphs of her Mission. That shy, earnest, undergraduate of 1909 had metamorphosed before her eyes into a new, more self-assertive man who denounced foreign interference, flaunted his handsome companion, and strutted about wearing native dress. Miss Holmes, who had given up her holiday in the cooler mountains, was unimpressed with his new manner and his dashing young friend. Lawrence later claimed that she had been unable to understand Dahoum’s Jarablus dialect – the dialect which he himself had called Vile’, and which in Dahoum’s golden mouth had acquired the melodious sound of ancient Greek. It is unlikely, though, that the Near East veteran Miss Holmes could not have communicated with the boy had she wished. Evidently, she did not find Dahoum the ‘excellent material’ Lawrence had so proudly assured her colleague Miss Rieder he was. Lawrence never stayed at the Mission again, nor did he receive any further letters from Miss Holmes. When he passed through Beirut in February 1913, a visit to Jebayyil was notably absent from his schedule.

  Lawrence and Dahoum remained at Jebayyil for three and a half weeks, and would perhaps have stayed longer had he not received an urgent telegram from Haj Wahid, telling him that there was a crisis at Carchemish. The Germans, who had informed Lawrence that they would be suspending work during June, had built an extension railway line to the mound, and were preparing to plunder the stones Lawrence and Woolley had so painstakingly unearthed. Haj Wahid had protested to the Chief Engineer, Contzen, whom Lawrence described as an ‘ill-mannered bully’. The Chief told Haj Wahid that Woolley had given him permission, but the Haj knew the value of the stones, and would not budge. He told Contzen that he could not allow work to continue without further orders. Contzen sneered, but the Haj promptly sent a man to Birejik with a telegram for Lawrence in Jebayyil, and the following morning climbed the mound with a rifle and two revolvers and prepared to defend Carchemish. When the railway workforce of about 100 men approached with shovels and picks at the ready, he threatened to put a bullet through the first man to touch the walls of the mound. The workers had no heart for trouble. They simply went and sat down in the shade, until Contzen arrived and began shouting, whereupon the Haj threatened to shoot him, too.

  This was the situation when Lawrence arrived in Aleppo. He sent Haj Wahid a telegram to let him know he was on his way, but the Haj replied that he had already resolved to kill Contzen, and in preparation had sent away his wife, downed an entire bottle of whisky, and loaded his rifle. Alarmed, Lawrence sought out Contzen’s superior in Aleppo – the Director of the railway – and burst in on him at a dinner party, saying that unless he wired Contzen to desist immediately, the engineer would be a dead man. The Director found this highly amusing. He quickly changed his mind, however, when Lawrence threatened to sign an affidavit in front of the British Consul swearing that the Director had not lifted a finger to defuse the situation. The Director put an electric trolley at Lawrence’s disposal, and he arrived at Carchemish the next day to find that Contzen’s men were about to pull apart its venerable walls. With the help of the local Minister of Public Instruction, Fuad Bey, he persuaded Contzen to retire and remove his rails. Contzen received a public upbraiding, and the Haj was warmly commended. Woolley returned at the end of September to find peace in the camp.

  Work began again, and almost at once they were rewarded by the discovery of a Hittite door-frame with a perfect inscription. Woolley had ordered a light railway to be delivered from Europe, but it had been delayed, and a huge workforce of 200 men was required in consequence. Retaining them proved a headache, for Turkey was now at war in the Balkans and the Porte was recruiting every able-bodied man for the army. The Englishmen used their diplomatic immunity to protect their labourers, however, and gave sanctuary to those fleeing conscription in the Expedition House. Woolley forbade any policemen or soldiers from entering the dig. The ploy was effective, because while the railway camp was decimated, the Carchemish crew lost not a single man. This raised the prestige of the British enormously, and gave them a certain amount of protection against local insurgency, for minorities such as the Kurds and the Armenians were preparing to take advantage of the Balkan war to settle old scores with the Turks. In autumn 1912, Lawrence and Woolley visited Busrawi Agha, chief of the Milli-Kurds, a nomadic folk whose great leader, Ibrahim Pasha, was believed to have been poisoned by the CUP. Busrawi was talking openly of getting rid of the Turkish government once and for all, and the Englishmen learned to their dismay that the Milli-Kurds were planning to ransack Aleppo in revenge for the death of their paramount chief. As autumn turned to winter, news of Turkey’s defeats in Bulgaria and the advance of the Bulgarian army towards Istanbul was received with delight by the Kurds and Arabs. Ironically, perhaps, as long as the old Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II had remained in power as Khalif, these people had remained loyal to the Porte. With the coming of the CUP, though, the old loyalties had been sundered. It cannot have escaped Lawrence’s notice that they now regarded Hussain ibn ‘Ali, Emir of Mecca, as their religious chief. If the first faint clarion-call of revolt against the Turks sounded at this moment in Lawrence’s inner ear, it was drowned out by fears for the safety of the excavations and his countrymen in Aleppo, where, he heard, the Kurds had sent an agent to mark out the best houses for possible plunder. Woolley and Lawrence suspected that one of these might well be the British Consulate.

  It was at this troubled time that Lawrence chose to try out his newly acquired skill of disguise in native dress. Though his Arabic was now fluent, he knew that he could never be taken for an Arab – he was too fair in appearance, and his mastery of grammar too poor for a native speaker. But northern Syria was inhabited by many non-Arab peoples, some of whom were fair-skinned and spoke Arabic imperfectly. Lawrence believed he might be able to pass himself off as a member of one of these minorities. Just how good was Lawrence’s Arabic? He later tended to be misleadingly modest about his mastery of the language, and even told Robert Graves that he did not know a word of classical (written) Arabic, which differed a great deal from the various spoken dialects. This was untrue: Lawrence had studied written Arabic with Fareedah al-Akle at Jebayyil in 1911, and at least once wrote part of a letter to her in the language. There is also extant a single Arabic letter signed by Lawrence and addressed to Sharif Hussain of Mecca, the language of which, while comprehensible, displays a mixture of dialects and styles. It has been authenticated by Dr Basil Hatim of the School of Arabic Translation and Interpreting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, as being the work of a non-native speaker, precluding the idea that Lawrence might have dictated it to a scribe. As for Lawrence’s colloquial Arabic, that too eventually became a hotch-potch of dialects, mainly Syrian and Hejazi. Lawrence had an excellent vocabulary, but his pronunciation was poor, his grammar ‘an adventure’ – as he himself admitted – and he spoke with a noticeable English accent. Alec Kirkbride, later one of his colleagues, who had grown up in Egypt and really did speak Arabic ‘like a na
tive’, commented that Lawrence’s accent and pronunciation alone would have marked him as a foreigner. However, Lawrence was game to see whether he could pass as a native, and the opportunity arose near the end of November, when a villager arrived at the dig reporting that a sculpture of a woman riding two lions had been discovered near Khalfati, north of Birejik. Believing that the piece might well be Hittite, Lawrence dressed himself up in local costume and set off with Dahoum to investigate. They found the countryside seething with unrest. Thousands had been conscripted for the army, and whole villages had been depopulated. Kurdish tribesmen were being told by their Aghas to enlist in the Imperial army and then to desert as soon as they were given rifles. The whole district was awash with rumours of marauding bands. The Turkish police were trigger-happy and tense, constantly on the lookout, and no sooner had Lawrence and Dahoum entered Khalfati than they were arrested as suspected deserters by a military patrol. They were kicked downstairs into a filthy dungeon so harshly that Lawrence was badly bruised and Dahoum’s ankle sprained. In one version of the story, Lawrence suggested that he was beaten severely enough to be put in hospital. Whatever the case, they managed to escape by offering a bribe, and, abandoning the Hittite find, walked briskly back to wards Jarablus. Their way took them through the district of Nizib, where they found the Kurds excited, running about looking for a Christian to kill. Only Lawrence’s disguise saved him, and when they reached Nizib village they discovered what lay behind this bizarre behaviour. Two days earlier a horde of armed Kurds, under a chief called Derai, had looted the place and shot dead a Christian Armenian doctor whose fly-blown corpse still lay in the street. In Nizib and Birejik the native Christians were all in hiding.

  Despite his bruises, and the alarming knowledge of having been within a hair’s breadth of death, Lawrence made his way back to the site with some satisfaction. First, his disguise had worked, and he had been taken for a native peasant. Second, he had gained some exclusive news about the Kurds. Third, and perhaps most important for his own psyche, he had acquired, in his treatment at Khalfati, the elements of a fantasy upon which his masochism could feed. From boyhood, he had nursed a masochistic reverie about the army, a reverie acted out at the age of seventeen, when he had enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery. The idea of being a ‘deserter’ from the army appealed even more strongly to that fantasy: it represented resistance to an overwhelming authority, and provided a justification for the punishment which he enjoyed. He derived no pleasure from the actual beating he had received from the Turks at Khalfati, but the scene, relived and elaborated upon over and over again in his mind, would provide rich material for his imagination in years to come.

  8. Peace in Mesopotamia Such as Has Not Been Seen for Generations

  Britain and Syria 1913

  The Bulgars were turned back at the gates of Stamboul and the threat to Aleppo evaporated, but Lawrence had had his first whiff of revolt, and found it intoxicating: ‘As for Turkey, down with the Turks,’ he wrote in April 1913. ‘… Their disappearance would mean a chance for the Arabs, who were at any rate once not incapable of good government.’1 In June, when the excavations closed once again, he finally persuaded Dahoum to come home with him to Oxford. Previously the boy had been chary of accompanying him to a country of which he knew nothing: he had heard stories of Englishmen luring unsuspecting Arabs off to their homes and turning them into tinned meat. Even Hammoudi, the reformed bandit, for all his superior experience, was inclined to believe such tales. Seeing that Dahoum would not consent to come alone, Lawrence made the same offer to Hammoudi, and only a courageous leap of faith made the Hoja accept.

  They stayed in the cottage at the bottom of the garden at 2 Polstead Road, and Dahoum’s beauty caused a stir among Lawrence’s acquaintances, particularly Charles Bell, who commissioned the painter Francis Dodd to make a portrait of him. Dahoum found that he enjoyed being the centre of attention, and once, when Dodd was interrupted at a critical moment by Lawrence’s brother Will and some friends, the boy turned to look at them in annoyance. This was just the expression of sultriness the artist had been looking for, and he captured it precisely, leaving Lawrence to rave over the portrait’s ‘absolute inspiration’.2 While Hammoudi was pushed off onto Woolley some of the time, Dahoum stayed with Lawrence, lending a hand at the Ashmolean with the unpacking of antikas which had come from Carchemish. They were old friends, and it gave him some relief to discover what actually happened to them once they disappeared from the site.

  The Arabs found Britain fascinating, but their views were disappointingly rational: ‘… unfortunately,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘they are too intelligent to be ridiculous about it.’3 To Dahoum it seemed a fat country, full of fat people, luxuriant, green, wet – a vast garden without villages but with peaceful, populous towns with towering buildings. He found the food rich and plentiful; he stumbled about London on the Underground, enjoyed riding a bicycle up and down Woodstock Road in his dishdasha, and once stood in a public lavatory stroking the white-glazed tiles and murmuring ‘beautiful, beautiful bricks’.4 He thought that Syria was a mere flea-bite compared with England, and that the Arabs were too few in comparison with the English ever to count in world politics. Lawrence approved this view: it had been partly to impress these men with the reality of British power and munificence – as opposed to the weakness and corruption of the Turks – that he had brought them here in the first place. As regards his own people, though, his purpose had been to shock: to enhance his reputation as an eccentric Englishman. He was fond of declaring that Dahoum had ‘Hittite blood’ – a statement which was entirely meaningless in any literal sense, but which virtually established the boy as the pièce de résistance of the Hittite collection from Carchemish – a living archaeological exhibit. People came from miles around to photograph the two Arabs in national dress as if they were exotic beasts, and even Woolley conspired in the ‘Hittite’ fantasy, by claiming that Dahoum’s face was reminiscent of some of those found on Hittite sculptures. If he had understood this claim, Dahoum would probably have considered it ludicrous: he was an Arab Fellah who lived on the banks of the Euphrates, and to whom the Hittites meant nothing. To Lawrence and his colleagues, though, he was the epitome of noble savagery: ‘The picture of Dahoum still comes back to me,’ Edward Leeds wrote; ‘… he seemed too spruce and fine for any menial task – a noble figure.’5 Neither Leeds nor Lawrence was able to see that they had fallen into the intellectual trap of confusing ‘nobility’ – a moral quality – with ‘beauty’ – an aesthetic one. This aesthetic, quasi-zoological objectivism was expressed unselfconsciously by Will Lawrence, who visited Ned in Syria later that year, and wrote of the Bedu that ‘the Hoja [Hammoudi] does as a type, but I have seen many better specimens’.6 Lawrence was sensitive to the charge of ‘exhibiting monkeys’, however, and sought to preserve his Arab friends’ dignity by refusing offers of money on their behalf from the numerous people he allowed to photograph them. Hammoudi, for one, was not amused. He did not believe that his dignity was impaired by being so photographed, and for him the practice of honouring a guest with a gift was commonplace. Leeds thought the Arabs ‘child-like’, and was hugely tickled to hear that when asked what he would like to take home with him, Hammoudi had chosen a water-tap, which he thought would always provide water, and a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign, which seemed to him to have some talismanic power to prevent people from straying where they were not wanted. Only one disquieting moment marred their stay. This was when they encountered an Egyptian called ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, who was an undergraduate at St John’s and a friend of Will’s. They claimed later that he had said to them, ‘Soon we will cut the throats of these dogs!’ – meaning the British – upon which the two Jarablus men had rushed back to Polstead Road and demanded a gun to shoot him with. Lawrence, who had ordered that they should be kept out of the way of any other Arabs, was irritated by this incident: he despised educated Arabs and he despised Egyptians – what could be worse than an educated Egyptian? Yet the story
had a satisfying ring to it – proving the instinctive loyalty of the ‘noble’ Arab to the European, as opposed to the treachery of the Arab ‘corrupted’ by education. Lawrence wanted freedom for the Arabs, but for the Egyptians ‘freedom’ meant liberation not from Turkey, but from Britain, which had annexed their country in 1882.

  When the two Arabs returned to Jarablus with Lawrence that August they boasted about their experiences ad nauseam to the other labourers, much to the annoyance of the Cypriot overseer Grigori, who was profoundly jealous. For his part, Lawrence became even more proprietorial towards Dahoum than before. Later in the year, when he was visited by a young army officer named Hubert Young – an excellent Arabic speaker who would later fight alongside Lawrence in the Arab Revolt – they sat down to sculpt two gargoyles for the roof of the house. While Young produced the head of a woman, Lawrence made a naked model of Dahoum. Woolley was shocked to find the figure on the roof when he returned. To him, it seemed an obvious declaration of Lawrence’s homosexual nature, and he wrote that it was regarded as such by the other Arabs, who were scandalized by the idea. Though Lawrence later delighted in representing homosexuality as a practice casually accepted by the Arabs, this was far from the truth, and very much a product of his wishful thinking. In the European tradition of Orientalism the East was a cultural dumping-ground for those traits European society despised in itself, and the stereotype of the lascivious Arab formed part of this tradition. In fact, homosexuality was neither accepted nor flaunted by the Arabs, and if practised at all was practised discreetly behind closed doors. Though Lawrence’s affair with Dahoum was most probably platonic, the naked statue seemed to proclaim otherwise, and much of the reputation that had accrued to him was lost by this heedless but compulsive act.