Transcriber’s Notes
Misspelled words have been corrected. These are identified by
♦ symbols in the text and are shown immediately below the
paragraph in which they appear.
Details and other notes may be found at the end of this eBook.
LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS
_Onager solitarius in desiderio animi
sui attraxit ventum amoris._ Jeremiah
[Illustration:
description: Photo portrait shot of Lawrence bust statue
caption: LAWRENCE
_from a bust by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
]
LAWRENCE AND THE
ARABS
_By_
ROBERT GRAVES
[Illustration:
description: publisher logo of urn enclosed in a circle
]
ILLUSTRATIONS EDITED BY
ERIC KENNINGTON
MAPS BY
HERRY PERRY
LONDON
JONATHAN CAPE 30 BEDFORD SQUARE
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXVII
MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME AND
LONDON
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
LAWRENCE _Frontispiece_
_From a bust by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
‘AIRCRAFTMAN SHAW’ 48
MAP: THE ARAB AREA 60
THE EMIR FEISAL 72
THE EMIR ABDULLA 92
_From a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
THE VILLAGE OF DATE PALMS 118
FEISAL’S ARMY ENTERING WEJH 142
AUDA 156
_From a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
MAP: THE RIDE TO AKABA 164
AUDA AND HIS KINSMEN 178
_Copyright American Colony Stores, Jerusalem_
THE PILGRIM-RAILWAY 196
AKABA 212
MAP: LAWRENCE’S RIDES 226
DEMOLITIONS ON THE RAILWAY 254
ALI IBN EL HUSSEIN 260
_From a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
AZRAK 274
FAHAD OF THE BENI SAKHR 278
_From a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
ABDULLA EL ZAAGI 298
_From a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
MAHMAS 308
_From a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
MULE TRANSPORT NEAR ABA EL LISSAN 326
_Copyright French Army Photo. Dept._
MAP: THE CAMPAIGN IN THE NORTH 336
BUXTON’S MEN BLOWING UP MUDOWWARA STATION 342
AT GUWEIRA 346
_Copyright French Army Photo. Dept._
AN ARMOURED FORD IN THE DESERT 358
_Copyright Imperial War Museum_
LAWRENCE AND HIS BODYGUARD AT AKABA 370
FEISAL JUST AFTER HIS MEETING WITH ALLENBY 386
_Copyright Imperial War Museum_
LAWRENCE AT VERSAILLES 402
‘T.E.’ ON ‘BOANERGES,’ THE MOTOR-BICYCLE 428
INTRODUCTION
Early this June I was invited by the publishers to write a book about
Lawrence. I replied that I would do so with Lawrence’s consent. Shaw,
as I must call him, for he has now taken that name and definitely
discarded ‘Lawrence,’ cabled his permission from India, and followed
it up with a letter giving me a list of sources for my writing and
saying that since a book was intended about him anyway he would prefer
it done by me. He thought that I could write a book accurate enough in
its facts to discourage further unauthorized accounts and that he could
trust me not to spare his own feelings wherever I wished to draw any
critical conclusion. And he hoped that the book would have exhausted
all public interest by the time that he had finished with the Royal Air
Force and returned to civil life.
I have his most generous permission, with that of his trustees, to use
copyright material at my discretion—but certain limits were given—both
from _Revolt in the Desert_ and from _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ (of
which that is an abridgment), a book that will not be issued for public
sale in Shaw’s lifetime. Unfortunately owing to pressure of time my
completed typescript could not be submitted to Shaw before publication
and I apologize to him for any passages where my discretion has been at
fault. I did, however, write and ask him specific questions and sent
him rough drafts of nearly all my material. I must, however, draw a
clear line between Shaw’s approval of my writing the book if it had to
be written, and my own responsibility for the facts and opinions given
here.
These chapters contain much that is of interest, I hope, even to
readers of the _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_; and readers of _Revolt
in the Desert_ may be glad of a narrative that is continuous. Critics
must remember that Shaw, when preparing the _Seven Pillars_ for
private circulation, had in mind an audience of not more than a couple
of hundred people and that he consequently had greater freedom in
his vocabulary than I have had; and could also assume a specialized
knowledge of Eastern history, geography and politics in his audience
that I am not permitted to assume.
I have tried to give a picture of an exasperatingly complex personality
in the easiest possible terms. I have tried also to make a difficult
story as clear as may be by a cutting-down of the characters that occur
in it; mentioning by name only the outstanding ones and explaining
the rest in such terms as ‘a member of the body-guard,’ ‘a British
Staff-officer with Feisal,’ ‘a major-general,’ ‘a French colonel,’
‘the chief of the Beni Sakhr,’ etc. (Geography has been similarly
simplified; the maps have been designed so that few places occur on
them that are not mentioned in that part of the story to which they
refer, and few or no places are mentioned in the story that are not to
be found on the maps.)
This is not the method of history, but history, which is the less
readable the more historical it is, will not eventually be hindered
by anything I have written. I have attempted a critical study of
‘Lawrence’—the popular verdict that he is the most remarkable
living Englishman, though I dislike such verdicts, I am inclined to
accept—rather than a general review of the Arab freedom movement and
the part played by England and France in regard to it. And there has
been a space-limit.
For information about Lawrence I am greatly indebted to Mrs. Fontana,
Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Mrs. Lawrence (his mother), Mrs. Kennington, Mrs.
Bernard Shaw, Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, Colonel John Buchan,
Colonel R. V. Buxton, Colonel Alan Dawnay, Mr. E. M. Forster, Mr.
Philip Graves, Sir Robert Graves, Dr. D. G. Hogarth, Mr. Cecil Jane,
Mr. Eric Kennington, Mr. Arnold Lawrence (a younger brother), Sir Henry
McMahon, Private Palmer of the Royal Tank Corps, Serjeant Pugh of the
Royal Air Force, Mr. Vyvyan Richards, Lord Riddell, Mr. Siegfried
Sassoon, Lord Stamfordham, the Dean of Winchester, Mr. C. Leonard
Woolley, and others.
For permission to use copyright photographs, to _The Times_, the
Imperial War Museum, the French Army Photographic Department, Major
Goslett, Colonel R. V. Buxton, Dr. D. G. Hogarth, Serjeant Pugh, Mr.
Eric Kennington, and Aircraftman Shaw himself.
R. G.
_August_, 1927.
LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS
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.