‘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.