Part 2

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.