Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  It began when one of the labourers – a Kurd called Ali – discovered that his wage for a month’s hard labour was only five piastres. The workers were paid eight piastres a day by the German company, but the paymaster had built up a fine racket in docking wages for bread which the labourers did not eat, and for water, which came free from the Euphrates. ‘Ali protested that five piastres was not a proper reward for his labour, and when the German paymaster refused to listen, the Kurd dashed the money in his face. The paymaster’s Circassian steward promptly knocked him down, and when ‘Ali came up with a stone, the steward tried to shoot him. The other Kurds – 150 strong – broke ranks and began hurling stones at the German engineers’ office, smashing the windows. The Germans cocked their rifles, and opened up phlegmatically at everyone in sight, wounding five or six Arab workmen who were innocently engrossed in their labours thirty yards away. The Arabs downed tools, drew their pistols and fired back at the common enemy. The besieged engineers telephoned to their camp, and soon a solid phalanx of thirty armed Circassians, Turkish soldiers and fellow engineers swept across the bridge and began shooting from the near side. It was at this point that Lawrence and Woolley, who had run out of their house to find out what was happening, came under fire themselves. Lawrence saw a Circassian guard named Ahmad Zakkari step out about sixty yards away and take deliberate aim at Woolley. Fortunately, the man’s aim was bad, and the bullet simply richocheted around his feet. Lawrence sprinted across to the engineers’ office to tell the Germans that he and Woolley were not to be shot at. When he arrived back at the mound he was astonished to find that about 300 Kurds and Arabs had climbed it from the back, and were preparing to take the party on the bridge in a suicidal rush. Those who had revolvers were reloading them, and others had picked up crowbars and clubs. Lawrence and Woolley tried to push them back, even knocking some of them down, but soon the Circassian Ahmad Zakkari began shooting again, missing Lawrence but hitting a Kurdish boy he was talking to. This sent the Kurds into a mad frenzy, and it was only with tremendous force of will that the Englishmen managed to prevent them from opening fire. The crisis point had passed, however, and Lawrence and Woolley finally persuaded the men to carry their wounded to the Expedition House. About an hour later the crowd began to disperse into the village. One Kurd had been killed and about twenty men wounded by German fire.

  When the British and German Consuls arrived the following day with a detachment of 250 Ottoman soldiers, the camp was calm. The railway company asked Woolley and Lawrence to negotiate a peace settlement on their behalf, through their friend Busrawi Agha of the Milli-Kurds. Lawrence suggested a payment of £80 blood money for the dead man and £40 compensation for the rest. He also recommended sacking the Circassians, replacing the paymaster and another engineer, and installing a dozen Kurds as observers on pay day. These proposals were accepted gladly by both sides, and Busrawi Agha travelled to Aleppo on the safe-conduct of the British Consul, Raff Fontana, to sign the accord there. Woolley and Lawrence had not, however, forgotten Ahmad Zakkari, the Circassian who had deliberately tried to murder them. The Ottoman authorities issued instructions for his arrest, but he had fled into the mountains, and was never found. A few weeks later the excavations closed down. Woolley and Lawrence had already drafted out part of their report on the Negev survey, The Wilderness of Zin, but some solid research on the background of exploration in the region was required, which could only be provided by libraries in England. Instead of wandering that summer, therefore, Lawrence chose to return to Oxford. He was never to see Dahoum or Carchemish again.

  On 11 August, while Lawrence was at Polstead Road, he heard that Britain and Germany were at war. Young men everywhere – including his brothers and former classmates – clamoured to enlist in the forces, but Lawrence held back. Though he would later tell Robert Graves that he had tried to join an Officers’ Training Unit, and had been rejected owing to a glut of recruits, he subsequently denied this, confessing to Liddell Hart that he had never tried to enlist. Edward Leeds, with whom he frequently worked at the Ashmolean during late 1914, confirmed that he had not joined the recruiting frenzy: ‘My recollection is that he had no doubts about his duty,’ Leeds wrote later, ‘… he wanted to do his bit and fretted that he could not do it in the way he thought best … but he could bide his time and while waiting could calmly pursue other work and interests.’6 Lawrence clearly felt that he would be of most value in the Middle East, but Turkey had not yet entered the war on the German side. In anticipation, though, he applied to join the General Staff in Egypt: ‘The Egyptian people say they want me but not yet,’ he wrote to a friend that September, ‘and the War Office won’t accept me until the Egyptian WO has finished with me.’7 Lawrence was particularly vulnerable to tension, and the horrible suspicion that the Ottomans would not enter the war after all weighed on him heavily. If they did not, then the special skills he had acquired over the past five years would be useless to the war effort. There would then be no alternative but to join a combat unit and leave for France. The days of anxious waiting seemed to him interminable, and he wrote of ‘the horrible boredom of having nothing to do, & getting news about once a week and all the rumours and theories and anxieties of everybody all round you gets on all our nerves’.8 When The Wilderness of Zin was finished in October, he could stand the waiting no longer, and applied to his mentor David Hogarth to get him a war job. Hogarth was having trouble finding suitable war employment for himself, but managed to insinuate Lawrence into MO4, the Geographical Department of Military Intelligence, whose chief, Colonel Coote Hedley, sat with him on the council of the Royal Geographical Society. Fortunately, Hedley had heard something of Lawrence’s ability through Stewart Newcombe, and the Palestine Exploration Fund, and took him on to help put together a large-scale map of Sinai, which existed in sixty-eight sheets in manuscript form. Hedley’s instructions to Lawrence were brusque: ‘You go down,’ he said, ‘and see what you can do with the damned thing!’9 The fact that Lawrence had seen only a small part of northern Sinai on the Negev survey did not deter him, and the same night he had produced a map six yards square, some of which was accurate, and some of which, he admitted, he invented. Hedley evidently succumbed to Lawrence’s apparent omniscience, for when, a few days later, Hogarth inquired if he had found the young man of any use, Hedley replied: ‘He’s running my entire department for me now.’10 He might have added that Lawrence was the department, since all the other map officers had been sent to France. Lawrence himself was still a civilian, however, and this fact became contentious when he was sent to take some maps to a senior officer, General Rawlinson, who, on seeing the ‘little pipsqueak’ in mufti, turned apoplectic and roared, ‘I want to speak to an officer!’11 Hedley quickly put this right by recommending Lawrence for a commission without even a medical examination. He was soon appointed as a ‘Temporary second-lieutenant interpreter’, and he bought his uniform off the peg from the Army and Navy Stores the following day.

  In February 1914, while Lawrence and Woolley had been wandering about the Negev, Sharif ‘Abdallah, second son of Hussain, Emir of Mecca, had arrived in Cairo for a visit to the Egyptian Sultan. He was no longer the inexperienced youth who had landed from the Tanta at Jeddah in 1908, but had spent his adolescent years hardening himself to the saddle, riding with Hussain’s Bedu levies, and, with his brothers ‘Ali and Feisal, carrying out punitive raids against recalcitrant tribes, and fighting in the ‘Assir in the name of the Turks. Highly astute, popular among the Arabs, Sharif ‘Abdallah was reckoned by many to be the true power in the Hejaz. Now, he was on his way to Istanbul to complain to officials of the Ottoman Government, who had just announced a new system of local administration. Known as the Vilayet system, it was intended to cut out traditional Arab leaders like his father, Hussain, who since 1908 had steadily been gathering power among the Bedu tribes. To install this new system, the Porte was determined to extend the Hejaz railway from its present terminus at Medina to the Emir’s seat at Mecca, and a hardline
governor named Vehib Bey had already been dispatched from Istanbul with seven battalions of infantry and a regiment of artillery to help carry the job out. If the railway was completed, ‘Abdallah knew, it would mean the end of his family’s power in the Hejaz for ever.

  The Hejaz railway had reached Medina in 1908, the year in which the Hashemites had returned to Mecca, but at that time Sharif Hussain had preferred to travel by ship, partly because Medina had then been under siege by certain Bedu tribes. It was, nevertheless, a triumph of Ottoman imperial vision and German precision engineering, crossing 800 miles of deserts and arid hills which for millennia had lain silent but for the tread of men and pack animals – a steel road, symmetrical, shining and alien. Designed by Meissner Pasha – a German engineer of insuperable drive and genius – it had been laid by a force of almost 6,000 Turkish soldiers, whose blood stained almost every mile of the track. With dogged fortitude, the Turks had swung their hammers, advancing slowly, suffering heat, thirst, hunger, flies and disease. There were great natural problems to contend with – vast wadis which had to be spanned by twenty-arched bridges: sandstone hogsbacks which had to be cut and blasted through. The track was in need of constant maintenance: the ballast of the embankments would subside and leave holes under the rails; drifting sand would block the culverts; floodwaters would fill them with detritus and wash the banks away; Bedu raiders would damage the tracks. The labourers worked in troops of twenty to fifty together, always armed, always with sentries posted in high places to warn them of the approach of Bedu parties. No Bedui was permitted to come near a station without permission upon threat of being shot down, and in the Hejaz almost every station was protected by a stone fort, each with its underground water-cistern, equipped with loopholes and steel shutters, and entangled by barbed wire. If the sentries spotted raiders approaching, they would give a signal to the working parties, who would jump aboard their trolleys and rush to the station. Sometimes they were attacked by the marauders before they could reach safety and cut down man by man: frequently they were obliged to hold out for several days. The Bedu were uncontrollable. They trusted no one and were constantly in arms against the government and against each other, yet they were united in their hatred for the railway, which had reduced the carrying trade, and enabled the Turks to strengthen their control in the Hejaz.

  In January 1914, with the new Governor and his eight battalions on the way, Hussain had played his Bedu card swiftly. He mustered the Sheikhs of the tribes and informed them of Vehib’s arrival and his objectives. ‘The railway will ruin you completely,’ he told them. ‘… Once the Turks can rush troops from one part of the Hejaz to the other, they will no longer need to pay gold to the Bedu.’12 The tribes saw where their interests lay, and gave the Emir their assurance of support. When Vehib arrived he found chaos: the telephone wires had been cut by Bedu tribesmen and the towns were starving; raiders were plundering shops in Jeddah and attacking caravans; his chief of police had disappeared, kidnapped by Bedu tribesmen on the Pilgrim road. The Governor dispatched a desperate message to Istanbul, and for a moment it looked as if the Turks might send a punitive expedition by ship from Smyrna. In the event, though, they backed down and offered ‘Abdallah 250,000 gold sovereigns to persuade his father to end the insurrection, promising in addition half the revenues of the railway once extended to Mecca. ‘Abdallah realized astutely that once the railway had been completed such promises would be as solid as the wind.

  Whether he had come to Cairo that February specifically in order to sound out the British attitude to Turkey is uncertain. He had already had in mind the prospect of fomenting a rebellion among Arab units in the Ottoman army in Syria and Mesopotamia and, with British diplomatic help, of securing first the independence of the Hejaz and then, perhaps, of a wider Arab state. It may or may not have been fortuitous that, at an official reception, ‘Abdallah bumped into Lord Kitchener, British Agent, but de facto ruler of Egypt, whose concern in the Hejaz was with the safety of Indian pilgrims performing the Haj – the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. At their first meeting it was this subject which they discussed. The following day, though, ‘Abdallah visited Kitchener and inquired tentatively what the attitude of Britain would be if a conflict should develop between the Hashemites and the Turks. Kitchener was circumspect. He himself already considered Turkey a prospective enemy which would threaten the crucial Suez Canal in the event of war: this was, in fact, why he, an Englishman, was the effective power in Egypt – a country still technically a part of the Ottoman Empire. Officially, however, his hands were tied. He explained to ‘Abdallah that Turkey was a friendly country which Britain had fought a war in the Crimea to protect. Britain was thus unlikely to intervene in any conflict between the Hejaz and the Sublime Porte.

  In Istanbul, ‘Abdallah’s protests to the Committee of Union and Progress fell on deaf ears, and he returned to Cairo in April 1914 fuming at his reception. By now, however, the Porte’s spies had got wind of his manoeuvres with the British and had dissuaded Kitchener from meeting him. Instead, ‘Abdallah spoke to Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary to the British Agency, from whom he requested a consignment of machine guns for ‘defence’ against the Turks. Storrs replied that ‘in principle’ the British Empire’s only interest in the Hejaz was the welfare of its pilgrims and repeated that Britain could not intervene. Secretly, though, Storrs was sympathetic, and by carefully chosen words intimated that Britain’s answer was not in fact so final as it seemed. The two men liked each other: Storrs, the traditional British Orientalist – suave, vain, sophisticated, perhaps bisexual, a lover of fine art and music: ‘Abdallah, the Arabian prince – worldly-wise, cultivated, truculent, highly popular, an incessant quoter of Arabic verse and lover of young boys. It was perhaps as these two highly intelligent representatives of their nations faced each other in the Abdin Palace that, in scarcely perceptible signs, hints and attitudes, the Arab Revolt was born.

  It was not until that autumn, when Turkey’s entry to the war seemed inevitable, that Kitchener was able to come out into the open. On 24 September he sent a cable from London, instructing Storrs to dispatch a secret and highly trustworthy messenger to ‘Abdallah in the Hejaz to find out whether the Hashemites would be with or against the British in the event of war. Storrs commissioned a veteran Persian agent named ‘Ali Asghar – known to posterity as ‘Messenger X’ – to go to Mecca disguised as a pilgrim. ‘Ali left Suez on 5 October, reached Jeddah three days later, hired a donkey for £2 and, having ridden all night, arrived in the Holy City the following morning. After several days’ wait, he managed to contact ‘Abdallah. He arrived back in Cairo before the end of the month, with a message conveying a response Kitchener had not anticipated. He would have been happy had the Arabs merely agreed to stay out of the war. Instead, to his surprise, ‘Abdallah promised to remain neutral for the time being, but, with sufficient diplomatic support, ‘to lead his immediate followers into armed revolt’.13 The text was cabled to London on 29 October: the Ottoman Empire declared war formally on Britain two days later. By early December, Lawrence, Woolley and Newcombe had been posted to Cairo’s General Staff.

  10. Cairo is Unutterable Things

  Cairo and Mesopotamia 1914–16

  When the black and white taxi deposited me in Ezbekiyya Square, Cairo, I had some difficulty at first in spotting the Grand Continental Hotel. I suddenly realized that it was the dismal, mouldering heap opposite the Ezbekiyya Gardens, half hidden by a row of very drab shops. In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I had seen a picture of the place as it had been in 1914, embossed on the head of a letter written by T. E. Lawrence, and it was difficult to equate this mildewed tenement before me with that great colonial château whose guest-list – A. & C. Black’s guidebook for 1916 had assured me – once read like a page out of the Almanac de Gotha. That grand world of Egypt’s belle époque, when Cairo had been a fashionable winter resort rivalling Nice and Monte Carlo, was lost, hidden like the hotel itself beneath the seedy façade of a hectic mode
rn city. In the dark lobby, a fly-blown man with a two-day stubble showed brown teeth when I pressed him for the price of a room: ‘This place hasn’t been a hotel in ten years,’ he said. In what had been the Front Desk Manager’s office – a place of peeling paint and faded velvet upholstery – a wizened man called Khalid groped in some filing cabinets and brought out a colour postcard of the hotel as it had looked ten years previously: precisely as neglected as it looked now, I thought. ‘They said it was beyond repair,’ he told me. ‘They couldn’t use it as a hotel any more, so they turned it into offices.’ There was no chance of me seeing the rooms upstairs, he said, but he would show me the downstairs area, and, fetching a great ring of keys, he led me like a gaoler across the lobby and unlocked a steel flange nailed across the dining-room doors. The room was astonishingly vast, with a plush carpet, once wine-red, perhaps, but now faded and rotten and covered in rat-droppings and bits of plaster fallen from the ceiling. ‘I was a bellboy here in the old days,’ Khalid said. ‘Kings and Princes used to come from all over the world. It was the best hotel in Egypt.’ He showed me the fine frescos of ancient Egyptian gods and Pharaohs which adorned the walls. ‘Italian artist,’ he said. ‘Done more than a hundred years ago.’ Lawrence must have known them well, I thought, for the Grand Continental had been his base for nine months from 1914 to 1915, and he had taken breakfast, lunch and dinner in this room almost every day. In the lobby, you could see the remains of a travel-agent’s kiosk, a worn-out sign announcing Nile cruises, and a jeweller’s shop, and Khalid showed me what had been the bar – though all that was left were the mirror-mosaic shelves where the bottles would have been on display. ‘Here they had whisky,’ he said, and I imagined the great and good of Cairo in 1914 – Ronald Storrs, Bertie Clayton, George Lloyd, Aubrey Herbert, Stewart Newcombe and others – nursing their drinks and turning over in their eminently civilized heads their dreams of Empire, their dreams of the Arab Revolt.