Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (27 page)

CHAPTER FIVE
Carchemish: 1911–1914

We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.

—James Elroy Flecker, “The Golden Journey to Samarkand”

D
avid Hogarth, though he seems to have had a gift for remaining in the background, was one of those figures beloved in English popular fiction: the superbly well-connected don; a scholar who was also an intrepid traveler and “a man of action"; an Englishman who could speak French, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Arabic fluently, and who was just as at ease negotiating with foreign governments and institutions as he was with those of his own country. Though married, and the father of a son, Hogarth was apparently not an enthusiast for domestic life; he was an inveterate and intrepid traveler, as well as a learned, witty, acerbic man, as much at home in high society as he was in the desert, a brilliant conversationalist in all his languages, and “respected throughout Europe” as well as in much of the Middle East. It comes as no surprise to learn that Hogarth and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, were at Winchester together and had remained in constant touch since their schooldays there.

When Lawrence went up to Jesus College in 1907 as an undergraduate, he was nineteen and Hogarth was forty-five and already a man of considerable accomplishments: a fellow of Magdalen College, he was the author of several well-received books; he had taken part in archaeological expeditions in Egypt, Crete, and Asia Minor; he had been director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens (an extremely prestigious post); he had served as a war correspondent for the Times during the 1897 revolution in Crete and the Greco-Turkish War—a hint that there was more to Hogarth’s life than archaeology—and he would become keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1909. Hogarth was one of those people who knew everybody worth knowing, and was welcome everywhere. A big, burly, sociable, broad-shouldered man, with a neatly trimmed beard, unusually long, powerful arms, and a dark, penetrating gaze, he was described by a woman who met him at a party as resembling “a cynical and highly-educated baboon.” In rare photographs of himself and Lawrence together, he towers over Lawrence by a head. A member of what has come to be called in Britain the Establishment,
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he was also an academic talent spotter, and the first to recognize in the young Lawrence the same quickness of mind, biting sense of humor, and sharp intellectual curiosity that had brought the young Hogarth himself a brilliant “First.” He described Lawrence in a letter to Charles M. Doughty, the great explorer of Arabia, as “a boy of extraordinary aptitude both for archaeology and a wandering life among the Arabs.” With great patience and tact he shaped the younger man’s career, almost always as a presence in the background, sometimes without Lawrence’s even being aware of it. As early as 1909, Hogarth remarked to E. T. Leeds, one of his archaeological assistants at the Ashmolean, about Lawrence, who was then just back from his first visit to the Middle East: “That’s a rather remarkable young man: he has been in parts rarely visited by Western travelers in recent years.”

Perhaps inevitably, Hogarth has been treated as a kind of Edwardianequivalent of John Le Carré's spymaster George Smiley by some of Lawrence’s biographers, as if he had recruited his young protégé for Britain’s secret service while Ned was still bicycling in a schoolboy’s shorts over to the Ashmolean with his finds, but this is to overemphasize that side of Hogarth’s life, as well as to underestimate Lawrence’s lifelong aversion to moving to anybody’s pace or orders but his own. Still, Hogarth was certainly one of that informal circle of learned and adventurous men and women who passed information on to the government, in his case about the Balkans and the Near East, though he was not by any stretch of the imagination a spymaster who recruited and trained undergraduates. In the days before World War I, professional spies were employed by the continental powers against one another, but the British, particularly in the far reaches of the empire, relied on an informal and above all amateur web of explorers, archaeologists, adventurous businessmen, and travel writers for information. Given the secretive nature of the Ottoman Empire and its increasingly feeble hold over large areas of its territory, British explorers, adventurers, archaeologists, students of religion, and Arabists proliferated in the great empty spaces of Syria and Arabia, to the alarm of the French, who themselves had designs on Lebanon and Syria; and it would have been unlikely for some of these people not to have gathered such information as they could for friends in the government and the diplomatic service, without feeling that they were, in any organized way, “spying.”

Certainly Hogarth encouraged the young Lawrence to combine his interest in the Middle East with his passion for archaeology; and Hogarth may also have been sensitive enough to guess that Lawrence would benefit from a long period away from home and away from the pressures placed on him there by his mother. Not that Lawrence would necessarily have confided all this to Hogarth, however sympathetic a listener he was, but there was no need for him to; Hogarth, Lawrence would later write, was “the only man I had never to let into my confidence—he would get there naturally.”

While Lawrence was finishing his research in Rouen, Hogarth had just returned from Turkey, where he had been discussing with the Ottoman authorities British interest in the ruins of the ancient Hittite city of Carchemish, then a mound of rubble covered by sand, dirt, and the debris of later cities overlooking the Euphrates near Jerablus. The Hittites—unlike the ancient Egyptians—were an archaeological problem of great importance to scholars because there were few excavated Hittite sites and their language remained undeciphered. The Hittites had lived in a broad, crescent-shaped area of Anatolia and northern Syria, stretching as far to the south along the Mediterranean as modern Lebanon and as far to the east as the border of modern Iraq. The history of their kingdom began about 1750 BCE and came to an end about 1160 BCE, when internal strife, and warfare with the Egyptians to the south and the Assyrians to the east, brought about the collapse of what had once been a great empire. The British had a great interest in the Hittites, in part because dazzling new discoveries of whole cities seemed likely to be made in the area (in contrast to what was now the patient, painstaking excavation of Egyptian tombs), and in part because here, as elsewhere, rivalry between Britain and Germany played a major role. Hugo Winckler’s discoveries at Bogazköy in Anatolia in 1906–1907 had put the “Hittite problem” on the map—until then there was some doubt that the Hittites had ever existed—and it now became an urgent matter of academic prestige for the archaeology department of Oxford and the British Museum in London not to lag behind the University of Berlin. The British had known about the mound at Jerablus since the eighteenth century, and had made several attempts to dig there, revealing the presence of immense ancient ruins buried under the shattered remains of a Greek and a later Roman city. But these excavations were being made in what one archaeologist described as “a dreary and desolate waste” in the Syrian desert north of Aleppo, and between that desolation and the difficulties raised by the hostile local inhabitants and the Turkish authorities, work did not progress swiftly. Now, doubts in the British archaeological world that the Hittites had existed gave way to the conviction that the mound at Jerablus was of greater importance than the one Winckler was working on at Bogazköy, and must be excavated systematically as soon as possible. Hogarth, with his knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, and the area, was naturally an enthusiast for a project that combined patriotism and scientific knowledge. He had already visited the site in 1908, and pronounced favorably on it to the British Museum, which had applied for permission to dig there to the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Constantinople; authorities there let the matter rest for two years, owing to civil unrest, rebellion, and the overthrow of the sultan.

In 1910, after Turkey had settled down in the firmer hands of the “Young Turks,” the British ambassador in Constantinople was asked to raise the matter again, and this time, permission was granted. Hogarth’s choice of Lawrence was a natural one. Lawrence had clearly demonstrated a flair for digging up relics of the past, as well as for bargaining for them; he had bought a number of Hittite seals for Hogarth during his walking tour of the Holy Land; he was physically tough and fearless; he had a smattering of Arabic; he was a keen amateur photographer; and he had actually come very close to Carchemish while he was in Syria. Lawrence himself, when he heard about Hogarth’s trip to Constantinople in 1910, had asked his old friend E. T. Leeds, at the Ashmolean, if there was any chance of his being included in the party going to Jerablus with Hogarth.

This raised any number of difficulties, since Lawrence was receiving a scholarship from Jesus College to support his research on medieval pottery for a BLitt degree, which, on the face of things, seemed incompatible with excavating a Hittite site in Syria. But despite Leeds’s doubts, Lawrence demonstrated his lifelong ability to get his own way. Hogarth agreed to take Lawrence, and then, with superb diplomatic skill, managed to secure for his young protégé a “senior demyship,” a kind of research fellowship, at his own college, Magdalen,
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which meant that the British Museum would not have to pay anything but Lawrence’s living expenses at thesite. This was not an inconsiderable feat—Lawrence’s demyship would bring him £100 a year for four years (about the equivalent of $12,500 a year today).

With equal skill Jesus College was placated by the suggestion that Lawrence would not only continue his research on medieval pottery but extend his survey of crusader castles in Syria, enabling him to expand his BA thesis into a book; and the British Museum was informed (a little optimistically) that his services were necessary to the expedition because of his command of Arabic, his familiarity with the area, and his knowledge about pottery. All this was the academic equivalent of a carom shot at billiards, and speaks volumes about Hogarth’s talent for manipulation, and Lawrence’s ability to claim convincingly many different skills at the same time. If Lawrence’s parents had any doubts, Hogarth no doubt dealt with those as well—he seems to have gotten along well with both of them—and moved swiftly to send Lawrence to Syria to improve his Arabic, for which so much had been claimed.

Lawrence sailed for Beirut at the beginning of December 1910, hardly more than two months after Hogarth’s return from Constantinople, leaving in his father’s hands the problem of the printing press that Vyvyan Richards and Lawrence were to have founded together. On the way to Beirut, Lawrence managed to visit Athens and Constantinople for the first time. Like many visitors to Greece, he was puzzled by how little the modern Greeks resembled the ancient ones, and compared the former unfavorably with the latter. The voyage, Lawrence complained, was very slow, and the meals were huge and endless (it was a French ship, of the Messageries Maritimes).

By December 10, he was able to write home from Constantinople, where he had an unexpectedly long stay when the engines of his ship broke down, leaving him free to do rather more sightseeing than he had expected. He reported home cheerfully that “the cholera has ceased to all practical purposes,” and he was probably the only tourist in the city’s long history to have found Constantinople “very clean.” He praised the “disorder” of the city, the noisy and colorful variety of its open-airmarkets, and the fact that there were hardly more than “twenty yards of straight street” in all of Stamboul. He attempted to interest three Canadian priests whom he had befriended in the pleasures of sightseeing in Constantinople, but they found everything very dirty, prompting Lawrence to express the broad-minded point of view that would enable him to lead the Bedouin in warfare: “They were always talking of quel salété, of the dirt & disorder of things, of the lack of shops and carriages and what they were pleased to call conveniences (which are more trouble than they are worth). They seemed too narrow to get outside their civilization, or state of living…. Is civilization the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage from ourselves?” This was a question that Lawrence was to answer for himself, over the next few years, with his attempt to live like a Bedouin and even to exceed the capacity of the Bedouin for living on the borderline of human existence.

Lawrence arrived in Beirut shortly before Christmas—it had taken him the best part of a month to travel from Britain to Lebanon—and moved immediately to Jebail, the ancient Greek city of Byblos, where he was to attend the mission school and “perfect” his Arabic.
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His teacher, Fareedeh el Akle, who was still alive in 1976, was more realistic about her pupil’s knowledge of the language than Hogarth had been. She praised his exceptional intelligence, and his determination to master the language, but pointed out that “in a short time he could speak and write a little,” which is significantly less than the command of Arabic that Hogarth had attributed to him. It is curious that this supposedly “crash course” consisted of only “one hour [a day] on a red sofa in the large hall,” though Lawrence surely also did a lot of reading and practiced his Arabic on the streets of Jebail. Fareedeh el Akle not only admired her young pupil, but appreciated his keen interest in the Arabian people, and “the spiritualside of his character.” Once, when she was talking to Lawrence about some matter of spiritual significance, he replied, “Help comes from within, not from without,” which might stand as the definition of his peculiar, lonely strength throughout his life. The inner strength of all the Lawrence boys was extraordinary, perhaps the most important quality they inherited from parents who had, by their own action, virtually cut themselves off from the rest of the world without any apparent regret.