Lawrence was living in a region which was entering a period of revolution. The prospect both excited and frightened him. His reactions to change were accordingly hesitant and confused; he wished both to see the Arabs emancipated from Turkish rule and to quarantine them from modern thought and commerce. The villagers of Jerablus enchanted him and he wanted to keep them just as they were, as much for his own satisfaction as for their benefit. Lawrence had been converted to Arab nationalism, but on his own and not Arab terms. On a small scale he had made himself a benefactor to the Arabs and his dreams may have encompassed gestures on a grander scale. The chances of their translation into action seemed extremely remote. As 1914 opened, the Ottoman empire lumbered on, and Europe was outwardly tranquil. All that Lawrence could be certain of was a further five or even six years dedicated to unearthing Hittite remains and sticking together broken pots.
V
For King and Country, 1914
The digging season at Karkamis stopped in December 1913 as cold and wet weather closed in. Thanks to Hogarth, Woolley and Lawrence had been assigned as archaeologists to the Egyptian military survey of western Sinai. Their brief was to trace ancient caravan routes, identify Biblical sites, and generally find out what they could about the historical development of a hitherto seldom explored region. Their work was to be concentrated in the central Negev around the Zin watercourse, and their joint account of their discoveries, which Hogarth edited, was called The Wilderness of Zin.
This was Lawrence’s first serious published work and appeared in the summer of 1915 under the imprint of the expedition’s sponsor, the Palestine Exploration Fund. It was, according to Hogarth, ‘a very faithful, discerning, and picturesque description of natural features and social character’. Hogarth also praised the ‘zeal and aptitude’ of his two protégés and acknowledged Lawrence’s unrivalled knowledge of Crusading and Hittite history. Hogarth concluded his recommendation of the book to Fund subscribers by drawing attention to its fluency and wit. ‘The style of the descriptive chapters is eminently readable, and the serious matter is relieved by lighter touches here and there, mostly in the vein of irony which close contact with Orientals seldom fails to encourage in the Western mind–and, perhaps equally in the Eastern.’1
The book was well received at the Fund’s annual general meeting in June 1915 when the President, Colonel Watson, an engineer, noted, ‘It is satisfactory to think that our explorers, civil as well as military, are under the flag.’ A former balloonist, he added that ‘Mr Lawrence was at one time, as a lightweight, used as an observer in an aeroplane — very useful for a man who surveys the country.’2
The background to the Sinai expedition of January 1914 was military. In 1905, the Turkish government decided to make a gesture designed to remind the Egyptians that they were Muslims and, in theory, still subjects of the Sultan, although their government had been controlled by Britain since 1882. Turkish patrols turned back a British surveying party, shifted frontier posts westwards towards the Suez Canal, and temporarily increased the Aqaba garrison to 4,500. Britain found this sabre-rattling intolerable and responded by sending a cruiser to Aqaba while warning the Turks that their provocation could lead to war. This stern reaction was dictated not so much by fears of the Turkish army marching into Sinai as by the knowledge, passed on by Lord Cromer, formerly Consul-General Egypt, and Kitchener, who had commanded the Egyptian army, that a Turkish attack would certainly trigger popular uprisings and mutinies inside Egypt. The crisis passed but the threat lingered. The purpose of Captain Newcombe, the expedition leader, was not merely the extension of geographical knowledge: his maps would be invaluable in the event of a war with Turkey, which Britain’s strategic planners knew would involve an invasion of Egypt across the Sinai desert.
Lawrence liked Newcombe; the two men would serve together during the war and remain close friends until Lawrence’s death. They soon found they had much in common, for Lawrence admired the stark simplicity of the soldier’s camp and the Spartan rigour of the expedition’s routines. Newcombe was an audacious, restless and unorthodox soldier. Years later, Colonel Edouard Brémond, who served alongside him in Hejaz, recalled him as ‘un soldat plein d‘allant, mais dont la nervosité inquiétait ses chefs; l’un d’eux le qualifiait de “wild man”.’ Newcombe’s manner did not blind his superiors to his professional talents. General Sir Reginald Wingate, anxious to secure his services in Arabia, described him as ‘a first-rate soldier and a man of boundless energy and resource’.3
Newcombe directed five survey parties, which charted the region south of Gaza. At first, the local Arabs were uncooperative and hostile but, thanks to Newcombe’s tact, relations improved. Lawrence found the Negev landscape and its inhabitants uniformly depressing. ‘The wearing monotony of senseless rounded hills and unmeaning valleys’ made ‘this southern desert of Syria one of the most inhospitable of all deserts’. The tribesmen were wretched creatures, ‘few in number, poor in body, and miserable in their manner of life’.4
One of the tasks assigned to Woolley and Lawrence was the investigation of Ain Qadeis, which had been identified as the Biblical Karnesh Barnea, one of the Israelite resting-places during their fortyyear migration through Sinai. What the two found was completely at odds with the eyewitness description published in 1884 by an American preacher H. Clay Trumbull. The discrepancies between what they saw and what the cleric said he had seen were an excuse for some dry pedantic humour: ‘Lastly, the pool into which Trumbull’s Arabs, after stripping, plunged so rashly to have a bath, is only about a foot or eighteen inches deep, and full of very large and sharp stones. Our guide also washed his feet in it.’ This led into a wider criticism of those who rather too easily linked modern places with those named in the Bible. ‘That glib catchword “The unchanging East” has blinded writers to the continual ebb and flow of the inhabitants of the desert’ and encouraged a mistaken faith in the continuity of place-names. Modern archaeologists knew better, and they pointed out that there were very good strategic and agrarian reasons why the region around Ain Qadeis could have served as an Israelite headquarters ‘during forty years of discipline’ in Sinai. As intended, these gibes provoked an academic row. An irritated partisan of the worthy Trumbull wrote from an American university to rebuke Lawrence and Woolley and insisted that the Palestine Exploration Fund excised their ‘objectionable statements’ from future editions of The Wilderness of Zin.5
Lawrence not only had fun at the expense of an earnest American clergyman; he teased the Turks in Aqaba. He had left Woolley and moved southwest across the Negev towards the Wadi el Araba and Aqaba. His search was for archaeological remains which might indicate for how long and by whom the township had been occupied. The commander of the small Turkish garrison suspected him of being a spy, forbade him to take photographs and refused him permission to cross to the small island of Gez Faraun. Lawrence constructed three makeshift rafts from zinc tanks and paddled himself, Dahoum and the camera across waters which he believed were shark-infested. Thwarted, the Turkish officer took no further action. Aqaba was, in 1914, an insignificant outpost whose garrison of sixty showed no stomach for a fight when, on 2 November, a naval landing party came ashore.6 Still, Lawrence was taking a risk, more dangerous for Dahoum, who was an Ottoman subject, than for himself. Free to leave Aqaba, he travelled northwards, examined Petra and caught a train to Damascus at Maan.
After paying off his servants at Maan, where Dahoum generously agreed to forgo his wages, Lawrence found himself short of cash. This happened often to him and this time he was rescued by the lucky appearance of another English traveller, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who advanced him some money. His charm served him well as it had in the spring of 1912 when he had thrown himself on the mercy of Raff Fontana, the Consul in Aleppo. Fontana cashed his cheques but was annoyed at the depletions of consular funds and the bad impression created locally by two Englishmen out of pocket — Woolley was in the same predicament. At other times Lawrence borrowed from Woolley in anticipation
of remittances from home. Like many spendthrifts he was generous, and letters home indicate that he constantly bought presents for his family.
Lawrence was back in Karkamis by the beginning of March for a fourth season of digging. The lodgings he shared with Woolley, Hogarth and any visitor who had come to inspect the workings were sumptuous. They had been built in the spring of 1912, when Lawrence had arranged the removal and re-laying of a Roman mosaic pavement of 250,000 pieces for the floor of the main room. Fittings included an abundance of fine carpets, and furnishings were carefully purchased in Aleppo. Unglazed Hittite cups were used for tea and coffee and Lawrence, who still abjured spirits, began to take wine with his meals. The decorations may have been Oriental, but the ambience was donnish. An American student visitor recalled Hogarth smoking his pipe and Woolley an after–dinner cigar, in an atmosphere which was elegant and academic. What his hosts thought of their guest, who turned up in a football sweater marked with a large ‘K’, is not known.7
Another, perhaps less agreeable feature of Oxonian life had been transplanted to Karkamis, Lawrence’s taste for undergraduate pranks. Once, Woolley, ailing from a fever, was given a disturbed night after Lawrence rigged up a device with a nail and a tin plate which rattled continuously. Hogarth was peeved to discover that Lawrence had scattered a pink cushion, hairpins, scent bottles and other female knick–knacks in his bedroom to remind him that he was forgoing married domesticity. It was Lawrence’s turn to fume when he was the victim of some playful Kurdish girls who tried to strip off his clothes and discover whether he was white all over. Woolley waspishly commented that Lawrence’s sense of humour was all one–sided, and that he was quick to anger when he found himself the butt of another’s joke.
When he came to Karkamis for a ‘peep’ at the railway, Captain Hubert Young, a real spy, found Lawrence a shy, quiet scholar who looked about sixteen or eighteen. Joined by Lawrence’s brother Will, the three spent much time target–shooting with rifles and revolvers.8 The sound of gunfire regularly broke the stillness of Karkamis as Lawrence kept his eye in. Just as the heroes of his medieval romances exercised with sword and lance, he practised with their modern equivalents. Skill with each was of course invaluable to a European resident in an ungovernable part of the Middle East and surrounded by armed tribesmen.
Pistols and their use were on Lawrence’s mind again at the outbreak of war in August 1914 when he ordered a brace of .45 Colt automatics from Mrs Rieder, who had returned to America from the Jeblé mission. They were destined for the battlefield, not the range, and soon after they arrived Lawrence gave one to his brother Frank, who was then in training camp prior to embarkation for service on the Western Front.
Lawrence had been brought up in an intensely patriotic, conservative family. As a child his father had taken him, no doubt dressed in his sailor suit, to watch Queen Victoria review the fleet at Spithead in 1897. As much as Rupert Brooke, he and his brothers Frank and Will represented that generation which volunteered with light, adventurous hearts and lofty sense of duty. Their response to the call to arms was an awesome and profoundly moving phenomenon. An insight into Lawrence’s mind at this time comes from two letters written to his parents after Frank’s death in action on the Western Front in May 1915.9
I hope that when I die there will be nothing more to regret. The only thing I feel a little is that there was no need surely to go into mourning for him. I cannot see the cause at all–in any case to die for one’s country is a sort of privilege: Mother and you will find it more painful and harder to live for it, than he did to die: but I think that at this time it is one’s duty to show no signs that would distress others....
This appeal troubled Mrs Lawrence, so her son wrote again.
You will never understand any of us after we have grown up a little. Don’t you ever feel that we love you without our telling you so?–I feel such a contemptible worm for having to write this way about things. If only you knew that if one thinks deeply about anything one would rather die than say anything about it. You know men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it is come.
Lawrence urged his mother to show the stoic impassiveness of a caste whose duty it was to show others a lead. ‘In a time of such fearful stress,’ he wrote, ‘it is one’s duty to watch very carefully lest one of the weaker ones be offended; and you know we were always the stronger, and if they see you broken down they will all grow fearful about their ones at the front.’ When it was Lawrence’s turn to see action, he took care that his mother never knew the perils he was exposed to behind enemy lines.10
Frank Lawrence, already destined for the army, had been commissioned in the 3rd Gloucesters in September 1914. Like Ned, he had held to a high sense of purpose, but he had not been blind to his possible fate. ‘I didn’t go to say good–bye to Frank,’ Lawrence explained to his mother, ‘because he would rather I didn’t, and I knew that there was little chance of my seeing him again; in which case we were better without parting.’ Will Lawrence, who was following the course of the war from Delhi, was also keen to volunteer. By November, he was serving as an officer in the 9th Gurkha Rifles, and four months later he returned home to join the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He briefly met Ned at Port Said in March 1915, and in October was killed serving as a Royal Flying Corps observer.
Lawrence later claimed that he had gone to the army recruiting officer, but had been turned down as too short. In fact his abilities were needed elsewhere. During the autumn of 1914, the War Office was desperately casting about for young men whose talents could be used by Military Intelligence. Priority was naturally given to those who spoke German or had travelled in France, but there was a need for other specialists. Hogarth, who realised Lawrence’s potential value to intelligence in the event of Turkey throwing in her lot with Germany, pulled strings, and by October Lawrence was attached to the Geographical Section of the War Office.
Still a civilian, he was ordered to classify roads and tracks on the army’s new map of Sinai. He was a diligent worker who impressed his section’ commander, Colonel Coote Hedley. On 1 November, the Ottoman empire declared war on the Allies, and soon after Lawrence was commissioned. He was ordered to proceed to Cairo with Newcombe (whose help he had sought to secure a swift commission) and Woolley and join the expanding intelligence section attached to General Headquarters. For a time, his mother contemplated going out with him, but abandoned the idea, no doubt because of her husband’s bronchial disorders.11 Lawrence and Newcomb crossed to France in the first week of December and at Marseilles took ship for Alexandria.
Lawrence was glad that the chance had come for him to do something to bring about the downfall of the Ottoman empire. Throughout September and October he had been hoping that the Turks would make common cause with Germany and Austria—Hungary. Once Turkey took the plunge, he felt her eventual defeat was assured and her empire would be dismantled to the benefit of all. He found the announcement that capitulations had been abolished ‘amusing’ and was indignant that the Ottoman government now had legal control over and the right to tax foreign property. This gesture of independence was welcomed throughout the Ottoman empire, whose subjects duly celebrated the outbreak of war with the same wild enthusiasm as those of the European powers.
The crisis of 1914 had put Turkey in an impossible position. In June, her diplomats had proposed an alliance with Britain, which they hoped might guarantee the immunity of Ottoman provinces from seizure by Russia or France. Britain, unwilling to be tied to an alliance which would harm her ententes with Russia and France, rebuffed the Turkish approach. She then went further and showed her indifference to Turkey by seizing two Turkish battleships which were nearing completion in British yards. They had been paid for by public subscription and their confiscation provoked a wave of anti-Allied agitation. The way was now open for Enver Pasha and his pro-German war party. Ottoman neutrality, they argued, would be disastrous since, if Britain,
France and Russia won the war, they would be free to dismember the empire. An alliance on equal terms with Germany and Austria-Hungary would boost the standing of Turkey. In the event of a victory, Ottoman survival would be assured and there would be substantial rewards, including Egypt and the Caucasus. In effect, the Turkish empire had no choice but to join Germany.
When he had left Karkamis in June, Lawrence had expected to return to the Middle East, continue his career as an archaeologist and work on his projected book. Giving way to the pressure of external events and impelled by his own concepts of duty, Lawrence found himself six months later a junior officer attached to the staff of the British army in Egypt. It was a turning point in his life marked, significantly, by the burning of the draft of his projected ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. His ambitions as a creative writer remained and, the war over, he resurrected the title for a new book based upon what he had seen and done with the Arab armies. Of course when he volunteered, Lawrence had resigned control over his life to the army, and he could have had no inkling of what it would do with him.
The Karkamis idyll had ended and with it a period of enjoyable, indulgent drifting. It had been a satisfactory existence which Lawrence would never experience again. The nearest he came to a summary of what he wanted from himself and from the world was an admission, made in December 1913, to Vyvyan Richards: ‘I fought very hard, at Oxford and after going down, to avoid being labelled.’ As a result, at twenty–six he was an elusive butterfly who flitted between extremes of mood and behaviour. He could be alternately animated and withdrawn, ostentatious and unobtrusive. He had a perceptive intellect and was considered a promising scholar, but his academic energies were easily diffused. He dreamed of silent, contemplative retirement, but relished spasms of intensive activity in which he stretched his body beyond the point of exhaustion. Above all, he sought and generally got what he wanted on his own terms.
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