Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (33 page)

As usual, Hogarth performed the required miracle, smoothed over the difficulties with the British Museum, and found funding to resume the dig at Carchemish. Lawrence returned in the third week of January—after a pause of a few days in Egypt, where he made an amicable visit to Petrie’s new site (and “was lucky enough not to find Mrs. Petrie there,” as he ungraciously remarked). In Cairo he visited the famous museum and found a Hittite cup mislabeled as Persian. He made a huge fuss, demanding that a correction be made, and when the keys to the case could notbe found, insisted on having it opened by the museum carpenter with a “hammer & screwdriver,” showing once again how quickly he could take on the identity (and attitude) of a pukka sahib toward the “natives” when it suited him to. To be sure, he did not like Egyptians, but still, there is a certain mismatch between Lawrence in this mood and Lawrence as the champion of Arab freedom. His increasing admiration for the Arabs did not, for instance, make him more tolerant of Negroes, Indians, or Levantine Jews.

He wrote home in February from Aleppo, where the Armenians, in no doubt about what was coming, were “arming frantically” and where there were “snow-drifts, & ice & hail & sleet & rain.” He managed to reach Beirut, but the railway north was blocked by snow in the mountains, and Lawrence was unable to get on a steamer from Beirut to Alexandretta in time to ensure the shipment of the many cases of antiquities piled up there for the Ashmolean and the British Museum. He drew on his friendship with the British consul, who arranged with the Royal Navy to have Lawrence, accompanied by Dahoum, taken to Alexandretta by a British cruiser, HMS Duke of Edinburgh—this kind of amazing good fortune seemed to happen only to Lawrence. On board the cruiser Dahoum was popular with the officers—he seems to have had considerable personal charm. In Alexandretta, another British cruiser took on board all the packing cases—the number of British warships and naval personnel with time on their hands off the Turkish coast is explained by the prevailing fear that the Turkish government might at any moment permit or encourage a massacre of foreign residents (including British subjects), to draw attention away from its defeats in the Balkans. In this matter, as in the buying of antiquities, Lawrence seems to have acted with a certain swagger.

While he was in England, he had ordered a canoe (from Salter Brothers, the famous boatbuilders in Oxford) and had it sent out to Beirut. In it, he hoped to explore the farther reaches of the Euphrates River during the spring—this is another example of Lawrence’s lordly way when it came to those things that really interested him, and also of his determination to make his time at Carchemish, which would now stretch out for at leastanother year, as pleasant as possible. Carchemish, despite the occasional brawls and confrontations with the authorities, was “a place where one eats lotos
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nearly every day.” There, Lawrence, in the company of his friend Dahoum, could arrange his life as he pleased, without any interference, provided that he carried out the basic duties of his profession to the satisfaction of Hogarth, whose approval was unfailing.

By the middle of March, despite cold weather and storms, Lawrence already had his canoe in the river, was teaching Dahoum to paddle it, and was luxuriating in the number of objects he and Woolley were at last beginning to produce in quantity. The list is endless: Hittite bronze work and carved slabs of basalt, Phoenician glazed pottery, Roman glass. In addition, the excavation was at last beginning to uncover greater portions of the Hittite city itself. Lawrence and Woolley worked without friction, and to any reader of Lawrence’s letters, it seems at least possible that Lawrence might easily have settled down into the role of an archaeologist and adventurer in the Middle East, if it had not been for World War I. On the other hand, it is hardly possible not to read into his letters a foreboding that some kind of breakup or collapse was impending—that he was enjoying his “lotos-eating” days in the knowledge they would soon be ended. Perhaps for that reason, his interest in crusader castles and in writing a great book about the major cities of the Middle East had apparently gone the way of the thesis on medieval pottery. One senses that he already knew none of these things was going to happen. Certainly the Ottoman Empire in 1913 was, of all the uneasy places in the world, the one in which fearsome threats, anger, and hatred between the subject races of the empire and their masters, and a terrifying mixture of cynicism, corruption, and brutality at the top, seemed most likely to produce a conflagration. Turkey was balanced at the edge of an abyss, having lost all its possessions in North Africa and Europe; itsrulers were determined to hold out for the highest price in the event of war between the great powers rather than risk neutrality and being left out of the spoils of victory, and they were always acutely aware that the majority of Turkey’s population consisted of subject races—Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Christians—who had in common nothing except a desire to get rid of the Turks as overlords and masters. Lawrence, who understood the situation better than most, can hardly be blamed for enjoying himself in his own way for as long as possible.

As the fame of Carchemish increased, so did the number of visitors, some of them American, whom Lawrence much preferred to Germans. At the end of April, having been told by the local boatmen that with the Euphrates in full flood he “couldn’t shoot the railway bridge” in his canoe “without upsetting,” he naturally took “a Miss Campbell, staying with us,” down the racing river, and back up again, drawing a rare note of concern from his father, the expert yachtsman. Lawrence had apparently fitted “a square-rigged sail” to the canoe, and he pointed out in his own defense that even if it did upset, all he had to do was swim back to shore towing it—though he did not say whether Miss Campbell, in the long skirt of the day, would have enjoyed the experience.

In the same letter, Lawrence rather vaguely sketches out his future plans—he hopes to go to “Asia Minor” in July and August, to pay a two-week visit to England in early September, and to return to Carchemish with his brother Will. He reports that he has been asked by the Turks to dig for “Arab glazed ware” in Mesopotamia, a signal honor, given their distrust of foreigners, and a sign that Lawrence’s reputation as a specialist in pottery was growing in the scientific community—indeed, in mid-June he mentions that he is sending 11,000 pottery fragments back to Leeds at the Ashmolean, to be sorted and reassembled. He also boasts that it is already 109 degrees indoors in a darkened room, although the floor has been sprinkled with water—"a pleasant, healthy warmth,” as he puts it. But then Lawrence’s notion of comfortable warmth was very different from that of most Europeans: he relished heat, the hotter the better, and the only sensual indulgence he permitted himself throughout his lifewas frequent very hot baths, which he also recommended to his family as a precaution against influenza.

His interest in shooting remained strong—sensibly, perhaps, in view of the seething among the local Kurds—and he reported back to his brother Frank, also an excellent shot, that in a contest with a visiting British diplomat he had put five shots out of seven into a medjidie (a Turkish coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece) “at 25 yards with an automatic colt” (presumably the nickel-plated.32 Colt Dahoum is holding in the photograph Lawrence took of him). This is remarkably good, considering that Lawrence was “fast shooting without dropping the hand,” that is, emptying the magazine rapidly rather than carefully target-shooting, and putting three shots out of ten into an orange box at 1,200 yards with his Mannlicher carbine. Not many people could hit anything at a range of 1,200 yards with a carbine, and this certainly represents a standard of marksmanship not usually found among Oxford scholars—as well as a sign that Lawrence’s growing skill and interest in archaeology were unlikely to land him behind a desk at the Ashmolean Museum.

He adds, at the end of this letter, “Hope to bring 2 Arabs with me this summer,” and he did so, both as a reward to Sheikh Hamoudi and Dahoum for saving his life when he was suffering from dysentery, and perhaps also because of the fuss and interest he knew they would cause in Oxford, where they lodged in the garden cottage at 2 Polstead Road. Already there had been protests from both his parents about his casual mention that at Carchemish Friday was his Sunday—that is, Lawrence had adopted the Muslim and Jewish holy day of the week, rather than trying to impose the Christian day on his workforce or simply taking Sunday off to observe it by himself. His parents surely took this as a sign of religious backsliding. The shortness of his visit home—he was there only ten days—and the proximity of Hamoudi and Dahoum, neither of whom spoke a word of English, were perfectly calculated, as his mother must have guessed, to prevent any serious questions from her about his lifestyle, his future intentions, or his current religious belief.

What the two Arabs thought of Oxford is hard to know, but Oxfordwas fascinated by them. They learned to ride a bicycle, and caused a stir by cycling through the Oxford streets in their eastern robes. Dahoum had his portrait drawn by Francis Dodd, a friend of Bell’s; the process sparked in Lawrence a lifelong passion for sitting for portraits, far more than it did Dahoum, who shows his usual self-possession in the finished drawing. They met Janet Laurie, but were not impressed by her slim figure, the Arab taste being for plumpness in women.

No doubt one reason for bringing Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi home with him was that Lawrence wanted to make it clear to his mother and father that his future lay in Syria, not in England. The two men not only were his friends, but deeply respected Lawrence. More than that, he had assumed at Carchemish the role of a hakim, a man of wisdom—different from a sheikh, who is the practical day-to-day leader of a tribe or clan; or a mullah, who is a religious leader and Muslim clergyman. Hakim is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah in the Koran; and a hakim is one who settles disputes and the finer points of law and custom, and whose objective judgment can be relied on by all around him. In short, in the area around Jerablus Lawrence had become famous and admired, despite the fact that he was a foreigner and a Christian. He had all the attributes of a desert hero: he was immensely strong, despite his small size—he described himself as “a pocket Hercules"—an outstanding shot, physically tireless, generous, absolutely fearless, and yet gentle in manner. His self-imposed Spartan regimen gave him yet another bond with the Arabs, who made do with a little flour and a few dates out of necessity. Unlike most Englishmen, Lawrence could survive on their meager diet and walk barefoot where they did. And he could get them to work together without threats or the use of force, in contrast to the German officials, who, to Lawrence’s rage, made full use of the whip, indeed considered it indispensable.

For the same reason that he brought his two friends home to Oxford—he would have added Miss Holmes, from the American mission, whose presence would have been reassuring to Sarah, had he been able to—he urged one of his brothers to come out and visit him; he suggested it in turn to Will, Frank, and Arnold. He was proud of the position he hadachieved among people so very different from himself, and wanted his family to see it. His mother suspected that he had lost his religious faith, and this was true. Lawrence, once he left the family home and the daily Bible readings, never showed any further sign of interest in Christianity, or any other religion; it was a struggle his mother had lost by default, but being who she was she would never give up on saving her second son’s soul as long as he lived. Her eldest son, Bob, would eventually become her partner in faith, a missionary doctor; her younger sons would at least pay lip service to their mother’s intense Christianity for as long she lived; but her beloved Ned had managed to slip from her grasp in the one area that most concerned her. He had also succeeded in that most difficult of tasks for every young person—making a contented life for himself on his own terms, not those of his parents.

By the end of August, Lawrence and his two friends were back at Carchemish. Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi were transformed overnight into celebrities by their voyage to England, but Lawrence was disappointed to find that in his absence the local villagers had been digging up fourteenth-century Arab graves in search of gold, and carelessly destroying much valuable glassware and pottery.

In September, Lawrence’s brother Will arrived, on his way to India, where he was taking up a teaching post, and Lawrence had, at last, an opportunity of showing a member of his family the immense scale of the work he was doing, and his position as a local celebrity. Fortunately, Will’s letters are as long and as full of detail as Lawrence’s—all five of the Lawrence brothers were prodigious letter writers. Will was enchanted by Beirut and, like most visitors, thought Damascus “the most beautiful town” he’d ever seen. Also like most European visitors, he was overwhelmed by the abundance of fruit and flowers—"peaches and nectarines and apples and grapes … sunflowers and roses"—and the friendliness of the people. On September 16 he reached Aleppo, where Lawrence and Dahoum met him. “Ned is known by everyone,” Will noted, “and their enthusiasm over him is quite amusing.” Lawrence took the opportunityof introducing his brother to “Buswari of the Milli Kurds, here, a marvelously-dressed and dignified person who’s invited me to go over to his tribe and see some horse-racing and dancing.” By September 17 Will was at Carchemish, overwhelmed by the number of Lawrence’s friends—Armenian, Christian, and Kurd—and by the ubiquity of his fame. Buswari, of course, was one of the two Kurdish leaders who had settled their blood feud in the expedition house, and one of the grandest and most important figures in the area around Aleppo.

Will’s stay at Carchemish was slightly blighted by the fact that Lawrence was down with a fever—presumably a recurrence of malaria—but he described the mound and the expedition house in tones of awe, and was amazed by the number of people who came to visit Lawrence: “a lieutenant Young, making his way out to India via Baghdad, an American missionary Dr. Usher, going back to Lake Van, and the people from Aleppo the Altounyans.” The Altounyans were an enormously wealthy Armenian family: the father a doctor with his own hospital (staffed by English nurses) in Aleppo; the son a graduate of Rugby School and Cambridge; and the daughter, Norah, “very English.” Young was, among other things, a crack shot, and spoke fluent Arabic and Farsi. Lawrence’s abode near the site of the ancient Hittite city was more like a court than a scholar’s residence—people called on him constantly, and indeed it had become necessary to expand the expedition house to twenty-two rooms. Although Lawrence continued his deliberately meager diet, guests were served omelets for breakfast, and lunches and dinners with many courses.