Brigandage was common in this poor area, where the peasantry supplemented scant incomes by robbery and the authorities’ grip was weak. In 1911, Professor Garstang’s excavators exchanged shots with villagers near Aintab who were furious about the removal of an antiquity which might have fetched a high price with an Aleppo dealer. Details of this incident were swiftly passed to the Consul in Aleppo, who forwarded them to the Embassy in Constantinople. Strangely, nothing was reported of Lawrence’s mishap. Yet he had told his mother that a local newspaper had an account of the murder of ‘Mr Edvard Lovance’ near Aintab during the second week in September. ‘The hotel people received me like a ghost,’ after having read this news story, which seems to have been completely missed by the British Consul and his normally vigilant staff of dragomen. This was still the age of gunboat diplomacy, in which the murder of a British subject was interpreted as an act of war against Britain and when British consuls vigorously goaded local authorities into punitive action at the slightest affront to one of their countrymen.14
It was obviously better for Lawrence that his college Principal believed that his failure to keep term was the consequence of a bloody ambush rather than exhaustion, sickness, tattered clothing and an empty purse. Parental doubts could be dispelled by their son’s praiseworthy wish not to alarm them with letters describing his ordeal. University chums were no doubt fascinated to hear about their friend’s courage and resourcefulness.
Lawrence’s letters home and the recollections of those who knew him at the time show that he was an observant, intelligent and fluent teller of stories about himself and his travels. He had also assimilated the artifices of his medieval poets, and so his quest for antiquarian knowledge in the Lebanon and Syria was soon overlaid with invented flourishes. After all, he had completed a risky undertaking and, in private, egotistical yarnspinning was a harmless diversion. What he said in college rooms and later to such sympathetic listeners as Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves and Liddell Hart had a veracity in his own imagination where it shared a place with the deeds of Huon de Bordeaux and Sir Galahad. Moreover, the acceptance of such tales was gratifying, for it enhanced his own standing in the eyes of his audience. Yet in some aspects of human affairs an adherence to truth, although hard to achieve, is essential. On the public stage which Lawrence would shortly occupy, his concoctions of reality and fancy would prove dangerously misleading for those around him and, ultimately, for himself.
IV
Wandering Scholar: The Middle East, 1910–1913
Lawrence spent most of the four years between his going down from Oxford and the outbreak of the First World War in the Middle East. Except for four short visits to England, most of his time was taken up with the excavations at Karkamis, which became his second home. In the summer of 1911 he made a second excursion on foot in Syria which ended, like its predecessor, with him sick and exhausted. The following winter he was in Egypt for a short lesson in archaeological methods from Professor Flinders Petrie and, at the beginning of 1914, he joined a small official party surveying Sinai.
All these activities were directed by Hogarth, who in the autumn of 1910 had secured Lawrence a four–year demyship (scholarship) from Magdalen College which gave him an annual income of £100 and the independence to travel and study. Hogarth also procured him a daily payment of fifteen shillings (seventy-five pence) for his sustenance during the 1912, 1913 and 1914 digging seasons at Karkamis. Lawrence was therefore free to follow the course set by Hogarth, that of a professional archaeologist.
There were three parallel paths open to him which he followed fitfully. The first was as a historian of the Crusades who would merge his knowledge of contemporary texts with what he had discovered walking across the landscape of the former Crusader states. The ideas for ‘my monumental work on the Crusades’ were coalescing in January 1911 when he wrote at length to Leonard Green about the tactical problems which beset Crusading armies. Much of what he had to say was based on his first–hand observations in Syria, which had convinced him that ‘the extreme difficulty of the country’ hampered the deployment of armoured cavalry. Lawrence dropped this project and plumped for fiction instead. Since the beginning of 1911 he had in mind a book to be called ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ which he later dismissed as ‘a youthful indiscretion’. He burned what he had written in November 1914 just before he joined the army. What was destroyed were ‘adventures in seven type-cities of the East (Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus etc.)’, which he had presented as ‘a descending cadence: a moral symphony’. Beyond this outline of its form and pretensions nothing is known of the work.1
Lawrence also toyed with a third form of creative art. At the end of 1910 he was laying plans with Vyvyan Richards, then schoolmastering, for the setting up of a printing press which would revive the traditions which William Morris had founded at Kelmscott. The venture depended upon Richards learning how to print and on Lawrence capital, money earmarked from his scholarship and a £100 loan from his father. Land close to Morris’s birthplace in Epping Forest was purchased, but the additional funds needed to build a house and install a press could not be found. Mr Lawrence was sceptical of the enterprise and suspected that Richards would prove an unsatisfactory businessman. His coolness and his son’s increasing absorption in archaeology brought progress to a halt. In December 1913 Lawrence admitted to Richards that ‘I cannot print with you when you want me’ as the draw of his present work at Karkamis was too strong. ‘I have got to like this place very much: and the people here ... and it is great fun to be with them.’ The work would continue for at least five years, after which he expected that he would ‘go after another and another nice thing’.
Virtual exile in Syria suited Lawrence and he recalled it with pleasure. ‘Carcemish [Karkamis],’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw, ‘was a wonderful place and time: as golden as Haroun el Raschid’s in Tennyson.’ ‘The best life I ever had’ was how he summed up these four years to Liddell Hart. Several things contributed to his sense of well–being. The excavations were engrossing–‘Digging is tremendous fun, and most exciting and interesting.’ Furthermore, he had the adulation of the local Syrian peasantry and enjoyed a status and authority which he could never have experienced at home. Above all, in Syria he was completely cut off from English social conventions, and his freedom to behave as he wished was limitless. There were also people and places to be discovered and books to be read during extended periods of leisure.
These years of indulgence were also those of his apprenticeship as an archaeologist. In between distractions, Lawrence had to direct himself towards the serious business of learning how to uncover the buried past and interpret what he found. Training had started in Oxford after his Finals when he began to classify pottery in the Ashmolean. That same summer he made a fourth visit to France, accompanied for some of the time by his brothers Frank and Will, where he was on the look-out for pottery shards. The study of pottery offered the key to many archaeological mysteries. Lawrence hoped to learn from the patternwork of shards how Oriental designs passed into Europe at the time of the Crusades. In Constantinople in December 1910, he noticed that the glaze of local pottery on sale in the bazaars was identical to the fifteenth-century ware he had dug up in Oxford.
Examining pots in a museum was both a mental exercise and a preparation for field work in Syria, where Lawrence was given charge of the cataloguing and reconstruction of pottery. In June 1910 Hogarth had heard from the Foreign Office that the Ottoman government had finally given permission for the dig to begin at Karkamis. It was too late to begin that year, so he planned to start once the cold, wet north Syrian winter had passed. Lawrence went ahead of him by an unreliable French steamer whose meandering route gave him a chance to see Athens and Constantinople before making landfall in Beirut. At Athens he enthused over the Acropolis and imagined that he heard echoes of Aristophanes in the street banter of the Athenians. At Constantinople he renewed his iradehs which would officially guarantee his privileged status and smooth passage through
the Ottoman empire.
Waiting for Hogarth’s arrival, Lawrence renewed his acquaintance with Miss Holmes, the Principal of the American Protestant mission at Jeblé, and stayed several weeks as her guest; his Evangelical connections had their uses. There he practised his Arabic with the ‘wonderful’ Miss Fareedah el Akle, a young Syrian who found him an apt pupil: he bathed in the sea, pottered after antiquities and read two–week–old copies of The Times. Hogarth joined Lawrence in February 1911 and, avoiding routes closed by snow, they took a steamer to Haifa and then went by rail to Damascus. They were already late, for the excavations had been scheduled to begin that month.
Hogarth had been given £1,700 by the British Museum (Lawrence was unpaid but made do on his scholarship) and he expected the diggings to continue until November. At Aleppo, he, his deputy Reginald Campbell–Thompson and Lawrence received their licences to carry firearms and an escort of Turkish troops which had been requested by the Foreign Office. On 9 March, they set off for Jerablus with a convoy of over twenty camels, mules and donkeys, which carried their supplies. Hogarth demanded comfort and his boxes included three blends of tea and nine varieties of jam. The seventy-mile journey was a dismal tramp through rain and snow showers and took two days. When they arrived at Jerablus, the party found lodgings available in the vacant house of the manager of a licorice plantation. Labour was recruited from the village, whose forty households yielded between 90 and 120 labourers. Hogarth offered good wages, eight piastres a day (four pence), and there was never a shortage of willing recruits. For the peasantry of Jerablus, the archaeologists provided a welcome supplement to their sparse incomes.
During each of the four seasons of digging from 1911 to 1914, Lawrence had direct control over the workforce, with power to hire and fire men, which explains much about his relations with them. No one could afford to cross his path and all had to treat him with respect. Overall direction of operations was in the hands of Hogarth and, in his absence, Campbell–Thompson, hitherto a sedentary scholar of linguistics whose specialism was the deciphering of Hittite seals. Lawrence found him agreeable company. Like him, Campbell-Thompson would join Military Intelligence; in 1917 this ‘curious old bird with an amazing inventive brain’ was decrypting Turko–German wireless messages in Iraq.2
Initial progress with the dig was sluggish and the finds unremarkable. After two months, Hogarth proposed ending work in August when most of the labourers would have to harvest their crops. There was a further snag when the local owner of two-thirds of the site began grumbling and threatened to impede the work. On 24 June, the Trustees of the British Museum, disappointed by the yields and uncertain whether legal hitches might prevent further digging, decided to call a halt.
A month before, Campbell-Thompson and Lawrence had been visited by the explorer Gertrude Bell, who turned up well escorted by troops. She had hoped to meet Hogarth and her criticism of his principles of digging irritated Lawrence and Campbell-Thompson. She further ruffled their feathers by praising the techniques of the German archaeologists whose site at Qalat Surgar she had just visited. They not only dug up remains but tried to reconstruct the buildings which had been uncovered. ‘We had to squash her with a display of erudition,’ Lawrence wrote home, but in spite of a barrage of pedantry she left in a good humour. Lawrence, then aged twenty-three, she thought ‘a pleasant boy’ who ‘is going to make a traveller’.
She had heard of Lawrence’s plans for an excursion eastwards to re-examine Urfa and Harran. The expedition began in the second week of June with Lawrence taking a boat down the Euphrates to El Tell el Ahmar and then going cross-country, with a police escort, to Harran and Urfa. From Urfa he returned westwards to Birecik, from where he went down river to Jerablus. His objectives were, as they had been in 1909, an examination of castles and the purchase of seals. Again, he ran into difficulties. On 17 July at Harran he was troubled by a painful abscess on his tooth, and when he reached Jerablus twelve days later he had contracted dysentery. He was nursed by his boy servant, Dahoum, and Haroun, the site foreman, and treated with arrowroot and milk. After five days he had a false recovery which was followed on 8 August by a relapse. Four days later he set off for England.
After convalescence, Lawrence returned to the Middle East in December, this time to Egypt, where at Hogarth’s suggestion he offered his services to Professor Flinders Petrie, then excavating a large cemetery at Takhan, south of Cairo. Petrie was a querulous, brusque and opinionated scholar who, in 1885, had broken away from the Egypt Exploration Fund and set up his own British School of Archaeology, which was privately funded. Petrie’s experience and knowledge were unequalled. So was his way of life. In horror, Lawrence reported, ‘A Petrie dig is a thing with a flavour of its own: tinned kidneys mingle with mummy–corpses and amulets in the soup.’ What was worse, especially for a man lately recovered from dysentery, many of the opened tins had been festering for a week in the Egyptian heat. For his part, Petrie had been astonished by Lawrence, who turned up at the site in shorts and a white Magdalen blazer. He was indignantly asked if he had come for cricket. This must have been galling for Lawrence, who loathed team games, and he was firmly told that no English man in Egypt ever wore shorts. Still, master and pupil did eventually get on and Lawrence came to appreciate Petrie’s pawky humour. He did not, however, like his ‘too highly organised methods’. In short, Lawrence was soon bored by the painstaking examination and cataloguing of 1,500 Egyptian corpses.
After a few weeks with Petrie, Lawrence was recalled to Karkamis. A gift of £5,000 to the British Museum and a further £2,000 from the Trustees made it possible for the excavations to be reopened and, in February 1912, Lawrence was sent by Hogarth to Aleppo to handle the problem of the site’s ownership. He was also to investigate reports that German railway engineers, then beginning their bridge over the Euphrates, intended to lay foundations for a depot and workshops on the southern side of the mound. They had been temporarily deflected by a false rumour that the British Museum owned the whole site. It fell to Lawrence, assisted by a consular dragoman, to sort out the business and persuade the local land owner, Hassan ibn Hussain el Maqale, to sell his portion of the site to the British Museum. Matters were further complicated by the Ottoman Ministry of Public Instruction, which wanted rights to the site, although it lacked the cash to pay for it.3
Lawrence was temperamentally unsuited to play the part of diplomat, but he was immeasurably more qualified than his new senior, Leonard Woolley. The confident, mercurial Woolley was eight years older than Lawrence, whom he had briefly met in Oxford. He had excavated in Nubia, experience which qualified him to take charge of operations when Hogarth was in England. In general, Woolley believed that the best way to handle the local peasantry and the Turkish authorities was by browbeating them and, when this failed to produce acceptable results, a revolver was brandished in their faces to a background of harsh words about gunboats off Beirut. Lawrence wholeheartedly endorsed such bluster. Beset by the lawsuits of Hassan ibn Hussain el Maqale, by official doubts about whether Woolley could excavate with a permit which named Hogarth, and by obstruction from local officials in Aleppo and Birecik, Lawrence was buoyant. ‘But good heavens don’t you know that no Turkish officer or policeman or government official can lay hands on an Englishman, or enter his house? Much less imprison him,’ he reminded his family in June 1912. ‘There would be a warship in Beirut if anyone in Birecik insulted us.’4
Mr and Mrs Lawrence needed such an assurance. On 17 March at the onset of the legal rumpus, their son had written from Birecik:
Have come up here with Woolley to fight the Kaimmakam [local commissioner]: we have done it: threatened to shoot any man who interrupted the digs, whether soldier or not. The Kaimm[akam] collapsed and sends strict orders to allow us to do our pleasure.... Woolley came out exceedingly well: he explained that he was not declaring war on the Turkish government, but on Birecik only. We are very well amused.
There were few smiles at the Consulate in Aleppo, which had
to clear up the mess. It was arranged for Woolley and Lawrence to discuss their difficulties with Fakhri Pasha, the Governor of Syria. The upshot of this interview with the Turkish officer, who as commander of the Medina garrison was to be one of Lawrence’s wartime adversaries, is not known. The iradehs and the invidious system of capitulations by which all Europeans were immune from civil or criminal actions in Ottoman courts ensured that, when the dust had settled, the Karkamis diggings proceeded unhindered. As to the Germans, the foundations of their bridge were built beyond the edge of the mound, perhaps as a result of a few words of Hogarth’s, uttered when he was a dinner guest on the Kaiser’s yacht.5
While Lawrence, pistol at hip, and Woolley, revolver in trouser waistband, swaggered and squared up to Turkish functionaries, the Ottoman empire was suffering graver and more wounding assaults. Italy, greedy for the Ottoman province of Libya, had declared war. Just after Lawrence disembarked at Beirut, Italian men-of-war had sunk two Turkish warships in the harbour. As he passed through Aleppo, Muslim crowds, inflamed by preaching in the mosques, were clamouring for arms with which to fight for Islam against the infidels. The war, which was soon to be followed by a wider conflict in southern Europe when Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Roumania combined to invade Turkey’s last remaining Balkan provinces, was one of a series of convulsions which had been shaking the empire since 1908.
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