Hero

by Michael Korda

  Hogarth, who arrived shortly after the shoot-out, praised Lawrence for his behavior “at much risk,” and promised to reassure Sarah when he got home. He stayed three weeks, and was much impressed by the progress that was being made at Carchemish, in part due to Lawrence’s vigorous dynamiting. In May, Stewart Newcombe arrived—Woolley had suggested to him that he should take an interest in archaeology, and that a trip to Carchemish to look at the railway line the Germans were building might be worthwhile. Newcombe had mentioned this suggestion to Lord Kitchener, who was all in favor of it. Newcombe and another British officer took a somewhat perfunctory look at the Hittite artifacts, then set off to the west to follow the railway route to the difficult country in the Taurus Mountains. They were unable to obtain much information, however, perhaps because they were only too clearly British officers, so Newcombe asked Woolley and Lawrence, who were planning to go home in June, to follow the same route on their way back to England. Lawrence planned toreturn to Carchemish in August 1914, but he was happy to spend a couple of weeks sightseeing in Anatolia with Woolley. They managed to get farther into the Taurus Mountains than Newcombe, perhaps because they were only too clearly a pair of archaeologists. They were certainly able to confirm that the railway tunneling in the mountainous areas was considerably behind schedule and that goods and passengers bound from Haidar Pasha, opposite Constantinople, to Baghdad would have to get off at Muslimie Junction, just north of Aleppo, and at Bozanti Khan, northwest of Adana, since the tunnels in both places were incomplete; thus there would be additional days of travel time and endless difficulties for troops, guns, and supplies being shipped to Iraq. Lawrence explained the two-week delay in his arrival home by telling his family that he was going down the Euphrates River with an army friend to see Baghdad, though in fact he would be traveling in the opposite direction overland with Woolley. No doubt it would have been difficult to explain why he was going on a long tour of the Taurus Mountains on the way home to England rather than simply taking the train to Beirut. Woolley would later explain, with what sounds like a certain degree of indignation, that it was “the only piece of spying that I ever did before the war,” but it is difficult to see the survey of the Sinai as anything but a milder form of espionage.

  By the first week of July Lawrence was at home in Oxford again, working with Woolley on the book that was intended to prove the survey of the Sinai had been on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund.* This turned out to be a bigger task than either of them had anticipated, in part because they had so little to show for their travels, and in part because Woolley’s and Lawrence’s styles of writing were very different, and neither was a natural collaborator. Furthermore, Lawrence’s notes did not take into account the work of numerous previous travelers in the Sinai, so he was obliged to spend a good deal of time gathering material in the Oxford libraries, perhaps no longer an easy task for a man who was now used to being out in the open all day with a gang of laborers. For whatever reason, the work went slowly, and the only hint we have of any relief from it is that Lawrence had dinner at Hogarth’s home with that intrepid traveler Gertrude Bell, and they exchanged many hair-raising tales about life in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. More interesting still was the amount of information she had gathered about the tribes who lived in the desert on either side of the Hejaz railway, including the Howeitat.

  There is no evidence, despite their political sophistication, that they dwelled on the news that the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife had been assassinated by Serb nationalists at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

  On July 28 an even more sinister event took place. Unsatisfied by the Serbians’ reply to its ultimatum, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; and in response, Serbia’s patron, Russia, began the slow (by reason of its immense size and primitive road and rail system) process of mobilizing its army, the largest in the world. Alarmed, Germany declared war on Russia on August 2. On August 3, France, obliged by treaty to mobilize its army in support of Russia, found itself at war with Germany; and in accordance with the long-standing plans of the German high command, the German army invaded neutral Belgium so as to reach Paris by the shortest possible route. Standing in his office as the long summer day drew to a close, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. I fear we will not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The next day, August 4, obligated by a seventy-five-year-old treaty to defend Belgium’s neutrality, a horrified and divided Liberal government declared war on Germany.

  It only remained to be seen whether Turkey would still be neutral—and, if not, which side it would join.

  Lawrence had planned to be back in Carchemish in August, and to work there for the next four or five seasons.

  He would never return.

  * The equivalent of les mandarins in France–that is to say, men (and nowadays women) who move at equal ease in the worlds of academia, government, big business, finance, and the arts as a kind of invisible permanent ruling class.

  * As a result, no fewer than three oxford colleges have a claim on Lawrence: Jesus, where he spent his three undergraduate years; Magdalen, because of his four-year demyship; and All Souls, where he was made a fellow after the Paris Peace Conference. During his four years as an archaeologist in the Middle east he often wore the white blazer of the Magdalen College Boat Club, to which, as somebody who never rowed, he was not strictly speaking entitled.

  * how good Lawrence’s Arabic became is still a matter of dispute among his biographers. he himself did not make exaggerated claims for it. he was eventually able to speak it reasonably well (though he was weak on grammar), and to recognize the major regional differences of speech, but he did not claim to be able to pass as an Arab.

  * A “squeeze” was then the accepted method for recording an inscription on stone. A sheet of paper of medium weight, not unlike blotting paper or papier-mâché, was soaked, applied to the stone, and forced into the crevices and markings with a brush and allowed to dry, then removed very carefully.

  * Flecker was by no means a negligible poet–his work “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” made it into the New Oxford Book of English Verse, and many of his poems were much admired and praised in their day.

  * Sir Flinders Petrie (as he became) was one of the first archaeologists to achieve worldwide celebrity, a trend that would reach its peak with the excavation of King tutankhamun’s intact tomb by howard Carter in 1923. Lawrence himself would contribute something posthumously to the later (fictional) character of the armed archaeologist-adventurer hero, of which “indiana Jones” is the most famous example.

  * John e. Mack, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, was a professor of psychiatry at harvard University, and perhaps as a result was apt to see the oedipal myth at work everywhere. What is more remarkable about Sigurd the Volsung is Morris’s determination to infuse nobility into pagan stories of lust, betrayal, and murder and transform them into a high-flown romantic tale, a kind of quest for the holy Grail, but without Christianity.

  * Conflict and bloodshed among Syrian Arabs, Mesopotamian Arabs, and Kurds, as well as between Shiite and Sunni Arabs, do not represent a new phenomenon in the area.

  * Not quite. hewlett had another twelve years of life and thirteen more books to go, before his death in 1923.

  * A pleasing, narcotic fruit on which the Lotophagi, referred to in the Odyssey, Book iX, fed. it produced apathy, and, in the case of odysseus’s shipmates, “as each tasted of this honey-sweet plant, the wish to bring news or return home grew faint in him.” (The Odyssey of Homer, trans. t. e. Shaw [Lawrence of Arabia] [New York: oxford University Press, 1932], 122.)

  * Woolley, who subsequently became critical of Lawrence, claimed that the villagers were scandalized because Dahoum had posed naked for Lawrence; but there is no proof of this, and since Young was present at the time, as well as any number of visitors, Arab and european, it seems unlikely. The carving of gargoyles, n
aked or not, would have been enough to scandalize the villagers, and would still do so in many parts of the Middle east, including Saudi Arabia.

  * in fact, given the use that was made during Allenby’s advance on Gaza, Jerusalem, and Damascus of the very accurate maps for which Lawrence was in large part responsible, the turks might have been better off turning down the Palestine exploration Fund’s proposal, rather than merely trying to obstruct it.

  * Young, Newcombe, Wingate, and Allenby the reader has already encountered. Dawnay was a tall, lean, perfectly dressed Guards officer, who would become one of Lawrence’s devoted admirers in 1918 (photographed together they looked like Mutt and Jeff), as did A. P. Wavell, and trenchard later on.

  * It would be published in 1915 as The Wilderness of Zin. There was also a brief report by Woolley in the 1914 Palestine exploration Fund annual statement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cairo: 1914–1916

  There was seen in the churchyard, against the high altar, a great stone four square, like unto a marble stone, and in the midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point.

  —Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur

  Like that of almost every family in Britain, the Lawrence family’s life was immediately transformed by the war. Frank, the next-to-youngest, slipped effortlessly and almost immediately into the Gloucestershire Regiment (popularly known as “the Glosters”), just as the Oxford University Officers Training Corps had prepared him to, and was rapidly commissioned as a second-lieutenant. Bob, the eldest, would join the Royal Army Medical Corps as soon as he graduated from medical school. Will, still working as a teacher in India, debated whether to join up over there, or come home. Like many other people, he expected that the war would be over in a few weeks, perhaps won by a great naval battle against the German high seas fleet; only gradually did he become aware that it would be a land war, with no end in sight.

  As for Ned, he was at first sidelined, at a moment when young men were volunteering in very large numbers. Some of Lawrence’s critics have wondered why he held back, but the reasons were perfectly simple. First of all, he did not see himself in the role of an infantry subaltern. Second, the War Office had raised the minimum required height for volunteers in an attempt to reduce the excessive number, and Lawrence, at five feet five inches, was well below it. Third, and most important, Field Marshal the Earl Kitchener was determined to have the Palestine Exploration Fund publish its book as quickly as possible.

  Kitchener, who had been on leave in England, had been about to board a cross-Channel ferry on his way back to his post in Cairo when Great Britain declared war. A messenger halted him on the gangplank at the last moment with a request from the prime minister that he return to London at once. The Liberal government, divided about the wisdom of going to war in the first place, was notably short of warlike figures, except for the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill, a former professional soldier and by far the most bellicose and self-confident member of the cabinet. Kitchener was offered and accepted, without any particular enthusiasm, a seat in the war cabinet as secretary of state for war. It was felt that his massive and formidable presence would reassure both the British public and Britain’s allies that military affairs at least were in the right hands. The poster of Kitchener, with his penetrating eyes and impressive mustache, pointing his finger directly at the viewer over the caption “BRITONS—(Kitchener) ‘wants you’ Join your country’s army! God save the king,” at once became perhaps the most familiar image of World War I.

  It soon became apparent that while Kitchener, the supreme imperial hero and autocrat, overshadowed the rest of the cabinet, his many years as a proconsul in Egypt had given him a certain resemblance to the Sphinx. He spoke seldom, and then in riddles that required considerable interpretation. He did not stoop to explain himself, and his enormous dignity and almost superhuman reputation discouraged his colleagues from asking questions. Whatever else he was, Kitchener was not a born politician. He was not a clever debater at cabinet meetings, and he did not relish the give-and-take of political infighting, unlike his aggressive young colleague Churchill. The result was that the British army and the Royal Navy were directed in very different spirits. Kitchener’s enormous, silent, intimidating presence at cabinet meetings was rather like that of the graven image of worship against which the Lord warned Moses on Mount Sinai.

  Although Kitchener was in charge of the War Office, he did not by any means give up his concern for the Middle East; and everybody in the Middle East—including Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar in Khartoum; and Sir Henry McMahon, who had replaced Kitchener in Cairo—still looked to him for advice and direction. Others in the cabinet might be alarmed by the Germans’ swift advance through Belgium, or by the ponderous slowness of Russia’s mobilization, or even by the diminutive size of Britain’s regular army, but some part of Kitchener’s mind was still set on the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal. Despite a secret alliance with Germany, the Turkish government had not declared war, and was in fact vigorously negotiating with both sides in the conflict. Kitchener, who had spent much of his adult life in the Middle East, except during the years 1902–1909 when he was commander in chief in India, still hoped to keep Turkey out of the war, or bring it in on the Allies’ side. He was therefore all the more determined not to admit that the Sinai map survey had been a military expedition, as opposed to an archaeological one. With his formidable memory and his capacity for detail, Kitchener continued to urge the book forward, thus effectively blocking Lawrence (and Leonard Woolley) from joining the army for the moment, and keeping them at their desks in Oxford.

  Trying to placate the Turks was all the more important because even before Kitchener had joined the government, Winston Churchill had single-handedly made a decision that brought relations between Britain and Turkey almost to the breaking point. The Turkish navy was so enfeebled after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897 that the then first lord of the admiralty, the second earl of Selborne, on visiting Turkey’s fleet in 1903, announced when he returned home, “There was no Navy!” The army was scarcely in better condition, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Turkey took the extraordinary step of entrusting the modernization of its army to a German military delegation, and of its navy to a British one. To some extent, this can be seen as an attempt to have the best of both worlds—an army trained and equipped by the Germans, and a navy trained and equipped by the British—but it was also symptomatic of Turkey’s attempt to survive by means of a balancing act between the great powers. In order to play the role of a great power in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Turkey would need modern warships, and it thus set out on an ambitious and expensive program to order more than forty ships from European shipyards, of which the two most important were the Reshadiye and the Sultan Osman I.

  Laid down in 1911, these were battleships of the British Dreadnought class, among the most powerful and modern warships in the world; the Reshadiye* was built by Vickers, and the Sultan Osman I by Armstrong. The Turks had spread their bet by commissioning each ship from one of the two great rival British arms firms, in the expectation that competition between the two firms would speed up delivery. These two great ships were a matter of intense and widespread national pride—the Turkish government, strapped for cash, had raised the £4 million (about $320 million in today’s money) needed to build the ships by asking for public donations. From all over the Ottoman Empire people, even schoolchildren, had contributed toward their purchase, and larger donations were rewarded with a patriotic medal. Both ships were launched late in 1913, and in a charming ceremony the daughter of the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St. James’s “christened” the Reshadiye by breaking a bottle of rose water against the bow, champagne being thought inappropriate for a vessel of a Muslim power. But as the months went by the Turkish government became increasingly alarmed by the long delays in fitting the ships’ armament, a
nd in endless gunnery and speed trials. By August 1914, however, the ships were at last ready for delivery, and Turkish crews were on hand to take them over and hoist the Turkish flag; but before they could do so, on August 1, 1914, armed British troops and naval personnel seized both battleships and raised the White Ensign on each stern. As every day brought Britain closer to war, Churchill, determined not to let two modern battleships go into the hands of a government allied with Germany, had boldly made the decision to “requisition” the two great ships, which were immediately incorporated into the Royal Navy as HMS Erin and HMS Agincourt.

  The reaction in the Ottoman Empire to this high-handed act was widespread anger—the ships had been paid for by public subscription, and Turkey was still a neutral country. “In Constantinople the seizure seemed an act of piracy,” in the words of Martin Gilbert. Historians still debate the wisdom of Churchill’s impulsive decision, but of course there was no easy answer. If Turkey was going to join the Central Powers anyway, then seizing its battleships was the right thing for the British to do; if there had been any chance at all of Turkey’s joining the Allies or staying neutral, then it was clearly the wrong thing to do. As first lord of the admiralty, Churchill thought it was better to be safe than sorry regarding two powerful warships.

  The act would almost immediately have grave and unforeseen consequences. In the first days of the war two fast, powerful German warships were in the Mediterranean, hotly pursued by a superior but slower British fleet. The German battle cruiser SMS Goeben and the smaller SMS Breslau, both under the command of Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, having failed to prevent the convoy of French troops from North Africa to France, steamed east and managed to outrun and evade the British fleet sent to sink them. “As the shadows of the night fell over the Mediterranean the Goeben increased her speed to twenty-four knots,” wrote Churchill in Volume 1 of The World Crisis, “… shook off her unwelcome companions and vanished gradually in the gathering gloom.” Having thrown off his pursuers, Souchon paused to take on coal from German freighters at Messina; then, instead of entering the Adriatic to seek shelter in an Austro-Hungarian port, as the British expected him to do, he set course instead for Gallipoli, where on arrival he urgently requested permission from the Turkish government to pass through the strait. After several hours of intense diplomatic negotiations the two Germanwarships were permitted to enter the Dardanelles, and were led through the minefields by a Turkish destroyer. They were now safely in neutral waters, and on August 16 they anchored off Constantinople, where, to almost universal astonishment, both ships were immediately commissioned into the Turkish navy, their German crews raising the Turkish flag and changing into Turkish uniforms, with a fez to replace the uniform cap. Thus, in less than two weeks, the Turks had lost two battleships and replaced them with two German cruisers—one of the cruisers, the Goeben, almost the equivalent of a battleship in strength and speed. Practically speaking, this had no immediate effect on the war—although the German ships and their crews could easily dominate the antiquated Russian warships in the Black Sea—but it was a brilliant propaganda coup for the Germans, whose popularity in the Ottoman Empire soared as a result. To most people it seemed to ensure that Turkey would join the war immediately on the side of the Central Powers.