Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

I

I write of him as Lawrence since I first knew him by that name, though, with the rest of his friends, I now usually address him as ‘T. E.’: his initials at least seem fixed and certain. In 1923 when he enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Tank Corps he took the name of ‘T. E. Shaw’: and has continued in that name in the Royal Air Force, confirming the alteration by Deed Poll. His enlistment in 1922 was in the name of ‘Ross’ and these two are not, he admits, his only efforts to ‘label himself suitably.’ He chose ‘Shaw’ and ‘Ross’ more or less at random from an Army List, though their shortness recommended them and probably also their late positions in the alphabet; troops sometimes get lined up in alphabetical order of names and Lawrence avoids the right of the line by instinct. He was tired of the name Lawrence,—and found it too long—particularly of the name ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ which had become a romantic catchword and a great nuisance to him. Hero worship seems not only to annoy Lawrence but, because of a genuine belief in his own fraudulence as its object, to make him feel physically unclean; and few who have heard or read of Lawrence of Arabia now mention the name without a superstitious wonder or fail to lose their heads if they happen to meet the man. A good enough excuse for discarding the name Lawrence was that it never had any proud family traditions for him. Mr. Lowell Thomas, who has written an inaccurate and sentimental account of Lawrence, links him up with the Northern Irish family of that name and with the famous Indian Mutiny hero ‘who tried to do his duty’: this is an invention and not a good one. ‘Lawrence’ began as a name of convenience like ‘Ross’ or ‘Shaw,’ and Lawrence was never of the tribe which does things because public duty is public duty. He acts in all things for his own best reasons, which though perhaps—I might say ‘certainly’—honourable are never either public or obvious. The Arabs addressed him as ‘Aurans’ or ‘Lurens,’ but his nickname among them was Emir Dinamit, or Prince Dynamite, for his explosive energy. Old Auda, the fighting chief of the Howeitat, used to called him ‘The World’s Imp,’ which is better still.

He was born at Tremadoc in North Wales in August 1888. This proved useful because later at Oxford University he could enter Jesus College, which financially favours Welsh students, as a Welshman. Actually he is of very mixed blood, none of it Welsh; if I remember rightly it is Irish, Hebridean, Spanish, and Norse. This again has always been useful; mixed blood has meant for Lawrence a natural gift for learning foreign languages, a respect for the manners and customs of strange people and, more than this, the power of entering a foreign community and being accepted after a time as a member of it. He has, also, no sense of the superiority of the English over foreigners. This he puts down merely to his general disrespect for humanity; but a strong natural bias towards the English may be suspected if only as towards the speakers of English, a language for which he cannot conceal his affection.

His father, now dead, came from County Meath in Ireland, of Leicestershire stock settled in the time of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a great sportsman. The mixed blood is chiefly from this side. His mother who two years ago went off unconcernedly to end her days with a mission in Central China—but has recently been sent back home much against her will because of political troubles there—is a woman of decision and quiet power: with features like Lawrence’s. She told me once: ‘We could never be bothered with girls in our house’: and, conveniently, she had five sons and no daughters. This home-atmosphere possibly accounts for Lawrence’s world being so empty of women: he was brought up to do without female society and the habit has remained with him. That he has a fear or hatred of all women is untrue. He tries to talk to a woman as he would talk to another man, or to himself. If she does not return the compliment by talking to him as she would to another woman, he leaves her. He has no false sense of chivalry. He is not a courtier but neither is he a boor.

His childhood was spent in Scotland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, France and Hampshire. In France he attended a Jesuit school, though neither he nor his family were Catholics. From Hampshire the family came to Oxford where Lawrence went to the City of Oxford School. Of his boyhood at Oxford there are stories that show that he began being the person Lawrence early. He took an interest in archæology which elder people thought unwholesome in a boy, and when old buildings were pulled down or excavations made was always on the spot. He had a secret arrangement with the city workmen to give him any pieces of pottery or other finds that they made and was soon an actual expert on the pottery of the Middle Ages. He had a theory which he intended to prove in a book that the dating of ancient pottery in England is all wrong, much of what is called Roman pottery being really Saxon: but that book he has never found time to write. At the age of thirteen he began a series of bicycle tours round England by himself and in pursuit of a study of mediæval armour made a large collection of brass-rubbings from old monuments in country churches. He made a point at his home of never saying when or where he was going or when he would be back. He liked to return at night by an upper window and be found in bed the next morning. To avoid surveillance later he refused to sleep in the house at all, but used a summer-house in the garden (he built it himself) as his bedroom. He explored the many streams about Oxford in a canoe: (and in after years brought a canoe with him at great expense to Mesopotamia, where it was the first canoe ever seen on the River Euphrates). Not content with the streams above ground he began exploring the underground streams of Oxford City. Probably he made a map; maps were his speciality. He made eight tours of France in his school vacations, studying the cathedrals and castles, and living on practically nothing. When he was sixteen he broke a leg while he was wrestling with another boy at the Oxford City School. He said nothing until school ended for the day and then returned home, not able to walk, on a borrowed bicycle. (He has never grown since that date.)

He took no interest in school games because they were organized, because they had rules, because they had results. He will never compete in anything. He was interested in machinery—(he is still an expert on racing cars and such-like, and after the War occupied part of his leisure with the help of the makers of the Brough Superior motor-cycle in testing and reporting on their next year’s models). He read widely, carefully and rapidly in several languages, his chief study being mediæval art, particularly sculpture. What is more remarkable is that while he was still at the High School he began thinking about that very revolt of the Arabs against the Turks which is the main story of this book.

At Jesus College in the University, where he won a scholarship, he read for the History School; or was supposed to do so. As a matter of fact the three years were spent chiefly in reading French Provençal poetry and mediæval Chansons de Geste. Mr. Vyvyan Richards, a fellow-undergraduate, has told me: ‘There was a mystery in the College about a strange undergraduate who never appeared in the daytime but spent hours of the night walking round the quadrangle by himself; I was one of those appointed to investigate; that was how I first discovered Lawrence. I patronized him at first as a second-year man does a first-year man, but I soon stopped that. I remember once I was teasing him for his theories about pottery; we were walking on the New College mound which is supposed to have been thrown up in the Civil Wars. I kicked up a bit of pottery and said to him, “You’ll tell me next that this proves something.” “Thank you,” he said, “as it happens it does. It goes to prove that this mound is considerably older than Cromwell’s time.” That silenced me. He never took any part in College life and never dined in Hall. Once in winter he arrived at my lodgings after midnight and asked me to come bathing. He wanted me to try the sport of diving through the ice: I thought it too dangerous, so he went off alone. He had a wonderful library, and was much interested in printing. It has been said that he printed books with me; but this is not true; there was much planning about it, but it never came off.’

Lawrence only lived one term in the College itself: the remainder of the time he was allowed to live at home. He read all night and slept in the mornings. He was not only a non-smoker and total abstainer but a vegetarian. In all his University life, as at school, he never took part in or watched a single organized game, though I believe he did a certain amount of roof-climbing, an unorganized night-sport which is entirely against University regulations. He is said to have invented the now classic climb from Balliol college to Keble college, a distance of perhaps a third of a mile, with only a single drop in between. This Lawrence neither confirms nor denies. He had a lively admiration for his tutor R. L. Poole and only once ‘cut’ a tutorial, then wrote to apologize. Poole replied: ‘Don’t worry yourself at having failed to come to me last Tuesday. Your absence gave me the opportunity to do an hour’s useful work.’ He apparently only attended three courses of lectures in the whole of his three years and found these unprofitable.

Mr. Cecil Jane writes of this period:

‘I coached him in his last year at the Oxford City School and saw a great deal of him all through his time at Oxford. He would never read the obvious books. I found out in the first week or two that the thing was to suggest rather out-of-the-way books. He could be relied upon to get more out of a suggestive sentence in a book than any ordinary man would get from a volume. His work was always on his own lines, even to the hours when he came to me. Shortly after midnight to 4 a.m. was a favourite time (living at home he had not to bother about College regulations: it was enough for his mother to report that he was “home by twelve”). He had the most diverse interests historically, though they were mainly mediæval. For a long time I could not get him to take any interest in late European History—was very startled to find that he was absorbed by R. M. Johnston’s French Revolution. While he was at school still I used to be surprised by his fondness for analysing character: it was a little habit of his to put questions to me in order to watch my expression: he would make no comment on my answer but I could see that he thought the more. In many ways he resembled his father, quite one of the most charming men I have known—very shy, very kind. Lawrence was not a bookworm though he read very fast and a great deal. I should not call him a scholar by temperament and the main characteristic of his work was always that it was unusual without the effort to be unusual. He liked anything in the nature of satire; that is why he appreciated Gibbon’s notes so much. He was very diffident about his own work; he never published his really admirable (but small) degree thesis. He was very robust, a little difficult to know, and always unexpected.’

When the time came for his final examinations for his degree Lawrence was unprepared. He was advised to submit a special thesis to supplement his other papers. He chose as his subject ‘The influence of the Crusades on the mediæval military architecture of Europe.’ Even before he went to the University, he had specialized in mediæval fortifications and had visited every single twelfth-century castle in England and France; it now remained for him to go to Palestine and Syria and study the Crusaders’ castles there. He decided to go out in the summer months of 1909, his last long vacation. He had learned a smattering of Arabic from a half-Irish Arab, then lecturing at Oxford, who advised him, if he went, to save expenses by living on the hospitality of the Syrian tribes. It was to be his first visit to the part of the world where he later became famous.

Before he left he visited Dr. D. G. Hogarth, the present Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, whom he met on this occasion for the first time but who has been his close friend ever since—‘the man to whom I am indebted for every good job I have ever had except my enlistment in the Royal Air Force.’ He told Hogarth that he was going to visit Syria to study Crusaders’ castles but wished to know where he would be likely to find remains of the ancient Hittite civilization, Hogarth told him what he wanted but said, ‘This is the wrong season to visit Syria: it is too hot there now.’ ‘I’m going,’ said Lawrence. ‘Well, have you the money? You’ll want a guide and servants to carry your tent and baggage.’ ‘I’m going to walk,’ Lawrence said. ‘Europeans don’t walk in Syria,’ said Hogarth, ‘it isn’t safe or pleasant.’ ‘Well, I do,’ said Lawrence. He went and was away for four months, returning to Oxford late for the next term. He had been on foot, in European dress and brown boots, carrying only a camera, from Haifa on the north coast of Palestine to the Taurus mountains and across to Urfa by the Euphrates in Northern Mesopotamia. He brought back sketch-plans and photographs of every mediæval fortress in Syria and also a collection of Hittite seals from the Aintab region for Hogarth. He had had two bouts of fever, Dr. Hogarth tells me, and had once been nearly murdered. The fever is perhaps hardly worth mentioning: Lawrence has had fever so often that he is quite used to it. He got malaria in France when he was sixteen and has had countless returns of it since. When he was eighteen he got Malta fever and since then has had dysentery, typhoid, blackwater fever, smallpox and other varieties.

The murder story has often been told, but incorrectly. What happened was that Lawrence on his way to Syria had bought a copper watch at Paris for ten francs. By constant use the case had been polished till it shone. In a Turkman village near the banks of the Euphrates where he was collecting Hittite antiquities he took out this watch one morning; the villagers murmured ‘Gold.’ A villager stalked Lawrence all day as he went on his journey and towards evening ran ahead and met him, as if accidentally. Lawrence asked the way to a certain village. The Turkman showed him a short cut across country; where he sprang upon Lawrence, knocked him down, snatched his Colt revolver, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. Though loaded it did not go off: the villager did not understand the mechanism of the safety catch, which was raised. He tried the trigger again and then in anger threw it away and battered Lawrence about the head with stones. The appearance of a shepherd fortunately frightened him off before he had succeeded in cracking Lawrence’s skull. Lawrence got up, crossed the Euphrates to the nearest town (Birejik) where he could find Turkish policemen. There he presented the order that he had from the Turkish Ministry of the Interior requiring all local governors to afford him every help, and collected a hundred and ten men. With this force, whose ferry-fare he had to pay across the river, he re-entered the village. Contrary to the usual story of a desperate fight and the burning of the village, there was no violence. Lawrence, with fever heavy on him, went to sleep while the usual day-long argument went on between the police and the villagers. At night the village elders gave up the stolen property and the thief. The true version of the story is better if only because it has this more satisfactory ending that the thief afterwards worked in the diggings at Carchemish under Lawrence; not too well, but Lawrence was easy with him.

During this walk he lodged every night, when off the beaten track, in the nearest native village, taking advantage of the hospitality which poor Syrians always show towards other poor; and began his familiarity with Arab dialects. Lawrence is not an Arabic scholar. He has never sat down to study it, nor even learned its letters—in any case twenty years’ study are needed before anyone can call himself an Arabic scholar and Lawrence has had a better use for his time. But he is fluent in conversational Arabic, and can tell pretty accurately by a man’s accent and the expressions he uses from what tribe or district of Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia or Palestine he comes. On his return to Oxford he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in History on the strength of his thesis, and the examiners were so impressed that they celebrated the event by a special dinner at which Lawrence’s tutor, Poole, was the host.

It is circumstantially related that the piece of archæological news which most delighted Oxford concerned the burial of Crusaders in the Holy Land; that it was known already that a knight who had been on one Crusade and died at home had his legs and the legs of his effigy crossed at the ankle, that a knight who had been on two Crusades had his legs crossed at the knee, but that Lawrence found that Crusaders who had died in the Holy Land itself were buried with their toes turned inwards. The incrustations of the Lawrence legend are typified in this completely false and widely current story. In the first place, Lawrence made no such discovery. In the second, he does not believe that the crossing of the legs of the effigies has anything to do with the Crusades. Let me take the opportunity of contradicting a further absurd story of Lawrence’s adventures about this time among the head-hunters of Borneo. Somebody has confused him, I suppose, with Rajah Charles Brooke of Sarawak; Mr. Lowell Thomas gives the story, alleging a British Museum mission.

The desert took a strong hold on Lawrence. He went riding out on one occasion (a year or two later) over a rolling plain in Northern Syria to examine a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed to have been made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay with which it was built was said to have been kneaded not with water but with the precious essential oils of flowers. His guides, sniffing the air, led him from one crumbling room to the next, saying, This is jessamine, this is violet, this is rose.’ But at last an Arab said, ‘Come and smell the sweetest scent of all,’ and they went to the main hall, where they drank in the calm, empty, eddyless desert wind. ‘This,’ said the Arab, ‘is the best, it has no taste.’ The Bedouin, Lawrence recognized, turns his back on perfumes and luxuries and the petty business of towns because in the desert he is without doubt free: he has lost material ties, houses, gardens, superfluous possessions and all other such complications, and has won instead a personal liberty in the shadow of starvation and death. This was an attitude that moved Lawrence greatly, so that, I believe, his nature has ever since been divided into two conflicting selves, the Bedouin self always longing for the bareness, simplicity, harshness of the desert—that state of mind of which the desert is a symbol—and the over-civilized European self. The European self despises the Bedouin as one who loves to torture himself needlessly and who sees the world as a hard pattern of black and white (of luxury or poverty, saintliness or sin, honour or disgrace), not as a moving changing landscape of countless subtle colours and shades and varieties. Again, the conflict is between the fanatic who is always either on the crest or in the trough of his emotions, who loves and hates violently, and the over-civilized man whose chief aim in life is to keep an equal mind even if he undoes himself by the very wideness of his sympathies. These two selves are mutually destructive, so Lawrence has finally fallen between them into a nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false god in which to believe.

Magdalen College, on Hogarth’s prompting, gave him a travelling scholarship for four years, and this enabled him to continue with his archæology. In 1910 he first went with Dr. Hogarth and Mr. Campbell-Thompson on the British Museum expedition to excavate Carchemish, the ruined Hittite capital on the Syrian bank of the Euphrates. Hogarth had engaged him on the strength of his Syrian walking tour and his knowledge of pottery. He was not a trained archæologist as yet, but an odd-job man at fifteen shillings a day and made it his main business to look after the gangs and keep them happy. For the rest, he had the photography, the pottery, the piecing together of broken sculptures and, later, engineering work in laying or lifting the light railway that carried earth from the diggings to the dumps. But the gangs came first. While they were happy the work was sure to go well. Lawrence knew them all by name and even the names of their children for whom they would beg quinine when there was fever about. Only he never knew any one of the men by sight; a peculiarity of Lawrence’s which will be discussed later.

In the winter of 1910, in the off-season for digging, Hogarth arranged for Lawrence to visit Sir Flinders Petrie’s camp in Egypt, to study the most advanced technical methods in digging. The camp was in a village near the Fayoum and the work was the uncovering of pre-dynastic remains of about the year 4000 B.C. Sir Flinders Petrie was at first not impressed with Lawrence’s appearance, and it is said reprimanded him for appearing at the camp in football shorts and a blazer. ‘Young man, we do not play cricket here.’ The absurdity of Lawrence as a cricket enthusiast is not the least comic point in the tale. However, Sir Flinders Petrie soon realized that he was a useful man to have with him, and tried to get him to join the camp again another year. But Lawrence thought that Egyptian excavations were dull compared with Hittite excavations. The Hittite was still an unknown civilization; with the Egyptians the main problems were solved and all that remained was to fill in unimportant gaps. The only personal recollection I heard from Lawrence about this digging in Egypt was that often in the evening when the sun suddenly sank and it got very cold he and his fellow-workers used to wrap themselves round and round for warmth in the white linen cloth which had been buried with these pre-dynastic Egyptians for their next-world wear (it was a period before mummy-wrappings) and walk home that way smelling of spices.

As an archæologist Lawrence soon won reputation. His memory for details is extraordinary, almost morbid. A friend once joked about him ‘there is something of the thin-lipped Oxford don about Lawrence’; but that was no more than saying that Lawrence has a vast well-ordered store of accurate technical knowledge on every conceivable subject and does not like to hear amateurs talk inaccurately when he is about. Half a dozen decisive words from Lawrence and superfluous talk ends. I was present once when an American writer who only knew Lawrence as a soldier began to teach him about Arabic art. Very soon finding himself in deep water the writer shifted to ground where he thought he was safe: he began to talk about Aztec stone carvings in Central America. Lawrence listened politely and corrected him on a technicality. After that the American stopped talking and listened. Field-Marshal Allenby, who is interested in archæology (and during the War took away the command of at least one officer because he pulled down an ancient building), told me: ‘When Lawrence and I talked archæology it was always Father Lawrence talking to a little schoolboy. I listened and learned.’

Probably Lawrence’s knowledge is not so vast as it appears and the impression of omniscience that he conveys is due rather to a faculty of forgetting what he calls utterly useless knowledge such as higher mathematics, class-room metaphysics and theories of æsthetics, and of fitting together harmoniously what he does know. A small knowledge which is in harmony with itself will seem uncanny to those with a much greater store of facts that do not hold together. Still, Lawrence’s knowledge must be pretty extensive. In six years he read every book in the library of the Oxford Union—the best part of 50,000 volumes, probably. His father used to get him the books while he was at school and afterwards he always borrowed six volumes a day in his father’s name and his own. For three years he read day and night on a hearthrug, which was a mattress so that he could fall asleep as he read. Often he spent eighteen hours a day reading, and at last got so good at it that he could tear the heart out of the most formidable book in half an hour. In reviewing Lawrence’s life, one has to accept casually such immoderate feats; they are part of his nature and the large number of them that can be verified excuses one’s credulity for others of the same remarkable character that are pure fiction.

Lawrence has been known to give information, when provoked, even where it could hardly be expected to be appreciated. ‘What are you grinning at, you there?’ shouted a sergeant-instructor to him one day about two years ago, when he was in the Tank Corps. ‘Do you really want to know, Sergeant?’ said Lawrence. He did. So Lawrence explained a joke in a late-Greek dialogue of Lucian’s that he had been turning over in his mind during arms-drill. He quoted for a quarter of an hour and the sergeant and squad listened without interruption in the greatest interest. Again, in a hut in the Air Force a comrade once asked him, ‘Excuse me, Shaw, but what does “iconoclast” mean?’—he acted as a handy cross-word dictionary—and then Lawrence outlined a brief history of the religious politics in fifth-century Constantinople which first gave rise to the word. But this is merely a good-humoured joke on himself: he despises mere knowledge, though he accumulates it and stores it carefully from old habit. He despises it because it is imperfect, because he sees knowledge as the opposite of wisdom. He never bluffs; and he dislikes bluffers. They say that in his first days in the Royal Air Force three years ago he helped some of the fellows who were taking German as an extra part of the education course. This came to the notice of one of the officers, who heard that Aircraftman Shaw had been seen reading a book called Faust. The next day, finding Shaw with his book, the officer began to show off: ‘What a wonderful writer Goethe was! Faust is a masterpiece, don’t you agree? Now, this is a passage that has always appealed to me very much’ (pointing over Shaw’s shoulder). ‘Yes,’ said Shaw, ‘but this is not Goethe’s Faust but Jacobsen’s Nills Lyhne in Danish.’ His knowledge does not help him much in the Royal Air Force. The Education Officer at Uxbridge asked him: ‘And you, what is the subject in which you feel particularly weak?’ The other fellows had said ‘French’ and ‘Geography’ and ‘Mathematics.’ Lawrence replied simply and truthfully, ‘Polishing greasy boots.’

This is getting too far ahead of the story, which is still about Lawrence as an archæologist before the War. In 1911 he was again at Carchemish with Hogarth. The report of the Carchemish excavations which lasted from 1910 to 1914 is published by the Oxford University Press. After 1911 Dr. Hogarth left the operations in charge of Mr. G. Leonard Woolley, who re-engaged Lawrence. A visitor, Mr. Fowle, has given a description of the life at the camp when he visited it in 1913. The Turks had given permission to the excavators to build only a single room; Lawrence and Woolley kept the letter and broke the spirit of the order by building a large U-shaped building and then partitioning it off into compartments each with a separate door into the courtyard that this single room enclosed. The compartments to the right were used for storing antiquities and for photographic work (Lawrence’s particular care); the sleeping-rooms of the excavators and their guests were on the left. The middle of the U was a living room with an open fireplace, well-filled book-cases and a long table covered with current British journals and the archæological journals of all the world. According to Mrs. Fontana, wife of the former Italian Consul at Aleppo, the house, which was of mud-brick, was paved with a Roman mosaic found in the upper layers of the excavations. She relates how Lawrence would cross the Euphrates in his canoe to get flowers from an island on the far side to liven up the place; a dangerous voyage, it seemed to her, for the Euphrates has a very powerful current. In its marvellously soft water he used to bathe every day. He had also got the workmen to make him a long clay water-chute and taught them the sport of tobogganing down it into the river.

Woolley and Lawrence had soon come to be on the best possible terms with their workmen, who were of mixed races: Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and so on. Local brigands were working for them at the diggings, including the leaders of the two most notorious brigand bands, the Kurdish and the Arab, and the two Englishmen were so well known and respected that they were made judges of various local disputes between villages or persons. Mr. Fowle relates that Lawrence had recently been away to settle a case where a man had kidnapped a girl from her father’s house but had not been able to get the father’s consent to a marriage.

In Woolley’s bedroom was an ancient wooden chest containing thousands of silver pieces for the payment of the workmen. It was unlocked and unguarded; because if any man had come to steal from it the other workmen would soon have found him out and taken matters into their own hands and probably killed the thief. Lawrence and Woolley found that the way to get the best results was to pay the workmen an extra sum of money for any antiquity that they found, according to its actual value. The workers accepted the sum offered without question, whether they were given gold or small silver, and the more willingly because the Englishmen accepted nothing that was not paid for. If the object offered was valueless it was returned to them. They came to take a real interest in the work and Mr. Fowle records the excitement with which the uncovering of a Hittite stone carving was watched, and the burst of applause and firing of two hundred revolvers when the four-thousand-year-old figure of a superb stag was revealed.

Lawrence himself, as Dr. Hogarth tells me, preferred sleeping outside the hut on a knoll, the ancient citadel of the city, close to the river. Here would gather the diggers and amuse him with stories, many of them scandalous, about the old Sheik of Jerablus (the modern village on the site of Carchemish) and his young wife, and about the Germans in their camp a quarter of a mile away. A railway was being made from Constantinople to Bagdad and at the site of Carchemish the railway had to cross the Euphrates. German engineers were building a bridge. The Germans could not be bothered to get to know their workmen by name, but used numbers painted on their coats as the quickest way of recognizing them. They even allowed members of tribes who were blood enemies to work side by side and many deaths happened this way. The Germans envied Lawrence and Woolley because they could always get as many workmen as they wanted. On one occasion when the Englishmen had to turn away fifty men for lack of money to pay them with, the men refused to go but stayed on without pay until money might come again.

With the Germans there was good feeling. Woolley and Lawrence gave them permission among other things to cart off for their new buildings such stones from the diggings as were of no archæological interest. But the chief engineer, Contzen, was a difficult man to remain friendly with. He was a rough drinking fellow, the son of a Cologne chemist. The back of his neck was too thick for Lawrence’s taste: it lapped over his collar. He came once to ask permission to dig away some mounds of earth which, though inside the excavation area, were close to the bridge where he wanted earth for an embankment. This was refused because the mounds of earth were the old mud-brick city walls of Carchemish and of great archæological importance. He grew angry at that and breaking off all friendly relations decided to wait until the digging season ended and the Englishmen went away. So when Woolley had gone to England and Lawrence to the Lebanon mountains, Contzen recruited local labour for digging away the walls. There was an Aleppo Arab called Wahid the Pilgrim left in charge of the diggings in the absence of the Englishmen, who, hearing what Contzen was about to do, went over to the German camp and told him that without orders from Woolley or Lawrence he could not allow the work to begin. Contzen answered that he would start the next day and ordered Wahid to leave the camp. Wahid sent a wire to Lawrence in the Lebanon, saying that he would hold up the work until further orders. He went the next morning with a rifle and two revolvers and sat on top of the threatened wall. A hundred workmen began laying a light-railway from the embankment to the foot of the wall, and Wahid addressed them, promising that he would shoot the first man who drove a pick into the wall, and then would shoot any German within range. The workmen, many of whom were of the English camp but doing temporary work in the off-season, stopped work and sat down at a safe distance. Contzen came up and threatened, but Wahid levelled his rifle and told him to keep his distance: Contzen did not dare to do more. All that day the two parties sat and watched each other, and all the next day. That night the Germans began a little revolver practice in their courtyard, shooting at a lighted candle: Wahid climbed up on the wall and fired half a dozen shots over their heads, shouting to them to stop their noise and go to bed: and they obeyed.

Lawrence wired to Wahid to hold on; he was now in Aleppo seeing to things. Wahid wired back that the Germans were becoming dangerous, and that the next morning he was going to the camp to kill Contzen. Then he made his will, got drunk and prepared for the morning. Lawrence in Aleppo found he could do nothing with the local Turkish Officials in whose care the diggings were supposed to be, so he wired to Constantinople, and got an unexpectedly quick reply: the Turkish Education Minister was ordered to go up to Carchemish in person and stop the work. Lawrence wired an order to Wahid to offer no further resistance to the Germans. He sent the wire by the railway telegraph, and the railway people, who naturally were on Contzen’s side in his embankment-making, knew nothing of the orders from Constantinople to stop the work and thought that the opposition was at an end. Lawrence and the Minister were given a motor trolley, on which they travelled at once. Wahid, getting the wire, was deeply disappointed and went off to drown his sorrows in drink. Contzen set his gang to work on the wall. They had hardly moved two or three feet of earth and mud-brick when up came the Minister in a fury, with Lawrence behind him, and made Contzen tear up the rails and dismiss his extra workmen, abusing him for his dishonesty. Wahid was publicly congratulated.

After this there was further trouble with Contzen. (Though not with the German camp as a whole as has been said: Woolley and Lawrence kept open house and the better Germans used to visit them regularly and dine with them.) One day, Ahmed, one of the house-servants of Woolley and Lawrence, on his way home from shopping at the village, met the foreman of a gang of railway workers. The foreman owed him money and a dispute started. A German engineer came up and flogged Ahmed without inquiring into the cause of the dispute: it was enough that the railway work had been delayed. Lawrence went to Contzen, and told him that one of the engineers had assaulted his house-servant and must apologize. Contzen consented to make inquiries, called up the engineer, and asked him for his account of the affair. He then told Lawrence angrily, ‘It is all a lie. This gentleman never assaulted your servant; he merely had him flogged.’

‘Well, isn’t that an assault?’

‘Certainly not. You can’t use these natives without flogging them. We flog every day.’

‘We have been here longer than you and have not flogged a man yet, and don’t intend to let you start on them. Your engineer must come to the village and apologize to Ahmed in public.’

‘Nonsense. The incident is closed,’ and Contzen turned his back.

‘On the contrary,’ said Lawrence (one can hear his small deadly voice), ‘if you don’t do as I ask I shall take the matter into my own hands.’

Contzen turned round again. ‘Which means—?’

‘That I shall take your engineer to the village and compel him to apologize.’

‘You will do nothing of the sort,’ said Contzen, scandalized; but then he looked at Lawrence again. In the end the engineer came to make his public apology, to the vast satisfaction of the village.

Later the Germans found themselves in great trouble. They had established a local bakery to prevent their men sending parties for bread to their home-villages every ten days. This bread-getting meant that thirty or forty men missed a day’s work. The Germans let the bakery to a town-bred Syrian (one of a most dishonest race), who decided to make his fortune. He used bad corn and so the bread was too sour to eat. The Germans had arranged that the money for the bread supplied should be deducted from the men’s pay. When the workmen refused to eat the bread and again sent home to the villages for their own, the price of the week’s bread that they had refused was deducted from their pay. Not only the bread contract but the contract for getting men to work on the railway had been given to adventurers; as Contzen’s successor Hoffmann discovered to his disgust. Complaints of the men not getting the money due to them were so numerous that he decided to pay them himself. Unfortunately he accepted the figures given him by the contractors, and there was trouble at once.

The first man who came to the pay-table had been offered fifteen piastres a day, which was a good wage, and had been working six weeks: he was down in the books as entitled to only six piastres a day. After deductions for bread which he had not had, water which he had got from the river himself, and so on, he was found to be owed only twenty-seven and a half piastres for six weeks’ work. The man protested. Hoffmann’s Circassian guard slashed him across the face with a whip. The man stooped to pick up a stone; his friends, who were Kurds, did the same, and the guard fired. A brisk battle started, stones and a few guns on one side, revolvers on the other. Lawrence and Woolley hearing the noise came up to persuade the men, about seven hundred of them, to cease fire. Lawrence has a gesture which he uses in emergencies of this kind. He lazily raises both hands, clasps them behind his head and remains silent and apparently wrapped in thought. It attracts attention more readily than any noise or violent motion, and when he has his audience quiet all about him he says what is to be said with the gentle, humorous wisdom of an old nurse subduing a noisy schoolroom. The Kurds ceased fire: but the seven Germans did not. They continued to use their revolvers from the hut where they had taken refuge, and the Circassian raised his gun towards Woolley and Lawrence as they came up begging the Germans to stop. The Germans had quite lost their heads and went on firing, though the Kurds were not firing back: it was only with the help of Wahid and a former brigand chief called Hamoudi, that Lawrence and Woolley prevented the whole mass of workmen from rushing down to do massacre. It was more than two hours before the Kurds could be drawn off: then it was found that the Germans only had cuts and bruises to show while the Kurds had eighteen men wounded and one killed.[1]

[1] This account appears in Woolley’s Dead Downs and Living Men: the slight differences in the story are due to emendations by Lawrence.

The Germans had wired for help to Aleppo at the first alarm, saying that their camp was being fired on: the telegram was mistranslated and a special train arrived with the Aleppo Volunteer Fire Brigade, brass helmets and all. After they had been sent back, a detachment of two hundred Turkish soldiers came and was stationed in the German camp. But all railway work ceased for a week because the dead man belonged to a Kurdish clan across the river, and his friends refused to allow the bridge-building to be carried on in their territory. The German Consul at Aleppo finally had to ask the Englishmen to settle the matter between the railway people and the Kurds. Woolley agreed and blood-money was fixed at £120. The German Consul refused, saying that the Germans had acted in self-defence, but he was soon made to see that a tribal matter must be settled by tribal custom. The Kurdish chief agreed to accept the money but only out of favour to the English, and things were patched up: in future the money for the workmen was to be paid to the Kurdish head-men direct from the Company for the payment of the workers, and the chief was to be himself responsible that the work was properly carried on. For these services Lawrence and Woolley were offered Turkish decorations, but refused them.

This ex-brigand chief Hamoudi and a younger man called Dahoum, who was trained by Lawrence as a photographer, came on a visit with him to England. They enjoyed Oxford, particularly the sport of bicycle riding, which was new to them. They had women’s bicycles because of their long robes, and got into trouble for the delight that they took in bicycling round and round the policeman who stands in the centre of ‘Carfax,’ the principal cross-roads of the city. They slept out in the garden. Their one regret was that they could not take the hot-water-taps back with them: Lawrence could not make them understand that these would not work in a Syrian mud-brick village as they did at No. 2 Polstead Road, Oxford. And they would stand in the public lavatories and stroke the white glazed ‘beautiful beautiful bricks.’

Among the women for whom Lawrence has had the greatest respect was the late Miss Gertrude Bell, one of the great English travellers in Arabia before Lawrence’s day. (Among these, by the way, who include Palgrave, Doughty and the Blunts, he does not reckon Sir Richard Burton who, he says, did not travel single-mindedly as the others did, wrote so difficult an English style as to be unreadable, and was both pretentious and vulgar. Among non-English travellers, he speaks highly of Burckhardt and Niebuhr.) Gertrude Bell visited the Carchemish camp one morning in 1911 and since news of her coming had arrived before her, the village was in a great state of excitement. At the time there were only three Englishmen in the camp: Dr. Hogarth who was married, Mr. Campbell-Thompson who was widely known to be engaged, and Lawrence who wore the red tasselled belt to his white flannel shorts which marked the bachelor in those parts. It was decided by the diggers that Gertrude Bell was coming to marry Lawrence and all preparations were made for a festival. When, therefore, she said good-bye the same evening and prepared to go off there was a great clamour. It was thought that she had refused Lawrence and so insulted the village. Lawrence managed to quiet them down by an ungallant but successful lie before stones were thrown and Gertrude Bell, who had been puzzled by the demonstration, never learned the truth until Hogarth told her some years later: it amused her greatly.

There were two digging seasons at Carchemish: between June and September the local harvest claimed the workmen, and between November and March the rains rained and the snow snowed and the Euphrates flooded the lowlands into a marsh. In the off-seasons Lawrence did not usually return to England but wandered instead all over Syria and the Near East studying antiquities, learning Arabic and getting in touch with the members of the various Arab Freedom societies of which an account will be given in the next chapter. He had already begun to take steps for the fulfilment of his schoolboy ambition to help in the Arab Revolt. But his immediate object was to collect information for writing a history of the Crusades. This is another book that he has never found time to write. He did, however, complete a travel-book called ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ later destroyed in manuscript, about seven typical Near-Eastern cities: Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, Aleppo, Damascus, Medina.

He was, among other things, a student of world-politics and saw that the alliance between the Turks and the Germans would have dangerous results. The Constantinople-Bagdad railway was part of a German scheme for establishing an Eastern Empire with the Turks as allies. He had already paid a visit to Lord Kitchener pointing out the danger of letting the Germans get control of the port of Alexandretta which is in the crook between Asia Minor and Syria, but Kitchener told him that he knew all about it. He had repeatedly warned the British Foreign Office of the complications that would follow—the French had ambitions for the control of Syria too—but Sir Edward Greys pacific policy allowed no alternative. Kitchener’s final words to Lawrence were that within three years there would be a world-war which would settle this lesser question with a greater. ‘So run along, young man, and dig before it rains.’ It has been said that Lawrence’s way of calling public attention in Europe to the concealed threat to world-peace in the building of the railway that linked Berlin with Bagdad was this: that he loaded sections of drainage pipes on mules and transported them by night to the hills which commanded the bridge; that he mounted them on piles of sand to resemble guns; that, as he expected, the Germans observed them through field-glasses, got excited and wired to Berlin and Constantinople that the British were fortifying the hills; that the European press was excited for days. There is no word of truth in all this comic-paper stuff. To begin with, Lawrence had no drainage pipes at his disposal.

The following are extracts from letters of Lawrence from Carchemish. The first is dated September 1912:

‘To-day is the end of Ramadan, and they are surging in and out of the courtyard firing revolvers, and bringing me portions from the feast going on in the village. I have twelve sheets of bread, wrapping up twelve packets of parched corn, with grapes and cucumbers in abundance. But I can’t yet talk Arabic!

‘There is a splendid dress called “of the seven kings”:—long parallel stripes of the most fiery colours from neck to ankle: it looks glorious: and over that they wear a short blue coat, turned up at the cuffs to show a dull red lining, and they gird themselves with a belt of thirteen vari-coloured tassels, and put a black silk and silver weave of Hamath work over their heads under a black goat-hair head-rope. You have then only to add a vest of gold-embroidered silk, and white under-tunics to get the idea of one man’s dress (I have forgotten Kurd knitted socks in nine primary colours, and red shoes), and there are ninety and nine, all different, eating a sheep before the door!

‘All is well here (after bad waves of cholera and smallpox) and I expect to get back at Christmas.’

The second letter is dated December 1913:

‘I have gradually slipped down, until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archæologist. I fought very hard, at Oxford and after going down, to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down, now.... I have got to like this place very much: and the people here—five or six of them—and the whole manner of living pleases me. We have 200 men to play with, anyhow we like so long as the excavations go on, and they are very splendid fellows many of them—I had two of them, head-men, in England with me this summer-and it is great fun with them. Then there are the digs, with dozens of wonderful things to find; and hosts of beautiful things in the villages and towns to fill one’s house with. Not to mention Hittite seal-hunting in the country round about, and the Euphrates to rest in when one is over-hot. It is a place where one eats lotus nearly every day.’

In the winter of 1913 Dr. Hogarth was asked to suggest an archæologist who might join the surveying party in the peninsula of Sinai—the desert between Palestine and Egypt in which Moses kept the Jews wandering until he had made a fighting people of them. He recommended Woolley, but Woolley could not spare the three months that he was wanted for, so he and Lawrence went together for six weeks and divided the work between them. They got on well with the surveyor, Captain Newcombe, an Engineer officer who afterwards was in Arabia with Lawrence, and made important discoveries of ancient remains. They mapped out, not too seriously perhaps, the probable route of the Israelites’ marches and found the place which may have been Kadesh Barnea where Moses struck the rock and water gushed out. They went as far as Petra and Maan in Arabia, places that figured importantly in Lawrence’s campaign four years later. Their report appears in a book called The Wilderness of Sin, published in 1914 by the Palestine Exploration Fund. The survey could not be complete without certain bearings taken at the Red Sea port of Akaba, but the Turks had refused permission, for military reasons. Lawrence told Newcombe that he would go and look at Akaba. He got there without opposition and took what notes he wanted. Then he had a sudden desire to explore the ancient ruins on a little island called Faroun Island which lies a quarter of a mile from the coast. He asked permission to use the one boat that was on the beach. The Turks refused and a large party drew the boat up on the beach so that he could not possibly move it. That did not stop Lawrence. In the middle of the day when all Turkish soldiers go to sleep he made a raft out of three of his large camel water-tanks. These copper tanks hold eighteen gallons apiece and measure about three feet six inches by one foot three inches, and are nine inches deep; they make excellent rafts. The wind took him safely across and he inspected the ruins, but he had difficulty on the return journey. The water was full of sharks, too.

The survey, it should be explained, was ordered by Kitchener for military purposes. But it was disguised as archæology. The Palestine Exploration Fund got permission from the Turks for it and the task of Lawrence and Woolley was, they found on arrival, to provide the archæological excuse for Newcombe’s map-making activities.