Part 3

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.

II

A brief description of Lawrence:—He is short (five feet, five and a half inches), with his body long, I should judge, in proportion to his legs, for he is more impressive seated than standing. He has a big head of a Norse type, rising steeply at the back. His hair is fair (not blond) and rather fine: his complexion is fair and he could go unshaved longer than most men without showing it. The upper part of his face is kindly, almost maternal; the lower part is severe, almost cruel. His eyes are blue grey and constantly in motion. His hands and feet are small. He is, or was, of great physical strength: he has been seen to raise up a rifle at arm’s length, holding it by the barrel-end, until it was parallel with the ground—yet no one would suspect him of being more than tough. In Arabia he won the respect of the desert fighters by his feats of strength and agility as much as by his other qualities. The pass-test of the highest order of fighters was the feat of springing off a trotting camel and leaping on again with one hand on the saddle and a rifle in the other. It is said that Lawrence passed the test. Of his powers of physical endurance the story will tell.

Here are a few first impressions of Lawrence; difficult to reconcile:—‘_That_ commonplace looking little man!’ (a poet). ‘Face and figure of a Circassian dancing-girl’ (an American journalist-lecturer). ‘A little man with a red face like a butcher’ (Royal Tank Corps). ‘Face like a cheap writing-pad; a proper swede-looking (i.e. bumpkin) chap’ (Royal Air Force). ‘A comical little x—’ (Royal Tank Corps). ‘A young man of considerable physical beauty: it is the sober truth that I have not seen such burnished gold hair before or since, nor such intensely blue eyes’ (a visitor at Carchemish). ‘A very quiet, sedate manner, a fine head but insignificant body’ (a major of the Camel Corps).

He has a trick of holding his hands loosely folded below his breast, the elbows to his sides, and carries his head a little tilted, the eyes on the ground. He can sit or stand for hours at a stretch without moving a muscle. He talks in short sentences, deliberately and quietly without accenting his words strongly. He grins a lot and laughs seldom. He is a dead shot with a pistol and a good rifle-shot. His greatest natural gift is being able to switch off the current of his personality whenever he wishes to be unnoticed in company. He can look heavy and stupid, even vulgar; and uses this power constantly in self-protection. When he first joined the Royal Air Force he was sent one day to nail down carpets under the direction of an Air-Marshal’s wife. She had known him well, but Lawrence to avoid general embarrassment did not wish to be recognized, and so she did not know him. As a matter of fact he is hardly ever recognized in uniform by people who used to know him. The tight collar and peaked cap are a disguise and there is nothing immediately remarkable about his appearance, no irregularity of feature or gesture or carriage. When the current is not switched off there is a curious feeling of force whenever he is in the room, a steady force, not an aimless disturbing one, and the more powerful because it is so well controlled; so that those who do not accept him as a friendly being are apt to fear him. I have even heard it said ‘Lawrence must have direct dealings with the Supernatural.’ This is, however, nonsense. The power is from within and not from without. I have noticed that he dislikes being touched; a hand laid on his shoulder or knee is an offence; he can understand the Oriental notion that ‘virtue’ (he would, I think, call it ‘integrity’) goes out of a man when so touched. He will never shake hands if he can avoid doing so nor will he ever fight hand to hand. He does not drink or smoke. This is not due to deliberate teetotal conviction or because he regards these things as poison, but principally because he has no occasion to drink or smoke. Most people begin drinking and smoking out of mere sociability: Lawrence always avoids sociability of any sort. He is uncomfortable with strangers: this is what is called his shyness. He regards drinking, gluttony, gambling, sport and the passions of love—the whole universe for the average man—as unnecessary; as, at the best, stimulants for the years when life goes flat.

He avoids eating with other people. Regular mealtimes are not to his liking. He hates waiting more than two minutes for a meal or spending more than five minutes on a meal. That is why he lives mainly on bread and butter. And he likes water better than any other drink. It is his opinion that feeding is a very intimate performance and should be done in a small room behind locked doors. He eats, when he does eat, which is seldom, in a casual abstracted way. He came to visit me one breakfast-time on his racing motor-bicycle: he had come about two hundred miles in five hours. He would eat no breakfast. I asked him later what the food was like in the camp. ‘I seldom eat it: it’s good enough. I am now a storeman in the Quartermaster’s stores, so I don’t need much.’ ‘When did you last have a meal?’ I asked. ‘On Wednesday.’ Since when apparently he had some chocolate, an orange and a cup of tea. This was Saturday. Then I think I put some apples near him, and after a while he reached for one. Fruit is his only self-indulgence. (Shelley, by the way, had this casual habit of eating, though he did not thrive on it like Lawrence: and he had Lawrence’s gift of entering and leaving a room unnoticed if he wished.) It is his occasional habit to knock off proper feeding for three days—rarely five—just to make sure that he can do it without feeling worried or strained. One’s sense of things gets very keen by this fasting, he finds, and it is good practice for hard times. His life has been full of hard times.

Lawrence also, when his own master, avoids regular hours of sleep. He has found that his brain works better if he sleeps as irregularly as he eats. In the Royal Air Force he is always in bed at ‘Lights Out’ and sleeps until after midnight. Then he dozes, thinking more or less until reveille. At night, he finds, the minds of others are switched off and that gives his mind longer range, free of their vibrations. He avoids as far as possible all social relationships, all public events. He joins no clubs, societies, groups. He answers few letters but the immediately pressing ones and not always those. On visiting Oxford in 1922 after two months prolonged to six in the East, he found his table stacked with correspondence; perhaps two or three hundred letters. He had given orders to have nothing forwarded. He read them all carefully and sent off a single answer—a telegram: the rest went into the waste-paper basket. Usually he will answer a pre-paid telegram. Or, it would be more true to say, he will use the reply-form, though not necessarily to the sender. He _never_ answers a letter addressed to him as ‘Lawrence’: this warning may save some of my readers money in stamps. When he does write a letter it is not of the sort that finds its way into the waste-paper basket. A Lawrence letter is always practical, considered, full, helpful, informative. This sort of thing ... ‘When you go to Rheims, go alone. Sit down at the base of the sixth pilaster from the west on the south side of the nave aisle and look up between the fourth and fifth pillars at the third window of the clerestory on the north side of the nave....’ (1910).

He is one of the rare people who have a sensible attitude towards money. He neither loves it nor fears it, for he has found it useless to help on the two or three occasions when he has greatly desired things worth while. He can be a financier if and when it pleases him: for the most part he is not bothered about his bank-balance. At the moment he has no bank-balance at all, and has taken great care not to make a penny out of any of his writings on the Arab Revolt. Apart from this he has done his best to earn money with his pen, and has made £35 in four years’ anonymous effort. He calls these earnings the jam on his Royal Air Force bread and butter. He writes with great difficulty and corrects much; and takes no pride or pleasure in anything that he has written. Most of these earnings are from translation-work and none of them from creative or original writing. He never intends to write another real book. He usually writes, by the way, in indian ink because it makes a good mark on the page. His handwriting is unpretentious and at first sight almost schoolboyish; but always legible. It varies very much with his mood, from large and square to small and narrow, from upright to a slight backward slant. I believe that the one thing that he likes is to find some one who knows more than himself or can do something better than himself. To such a person he will attach himself and learn all that is to be learned. And if he meets someone who can actually think faster or more accurately than himself and can even anticipate him in his apparently erratic but most carefully considered behaviour, so much the better. At the same time he has a savage conviction of his own general insufficiency which he will not allow to be contradicted by particular occasions on which he has been proved to excel others. It is not modesty but a sincere faith in his own unworthiness suggesting the cries in the Church Litany and will not stand contradiction.

Perhaps his most unexpected personal characteristic is that he never looks at a man’s face and never recognizes a face. This is inherited; his father one day stepped on his toe in the street and passed on with an apology, not knowing him. He would not recognize his mother or his brothers, even, if he met them without warning. Long practice has made Lawrence able to talk for twenty minutes at a time to whoever accosts him without betraying that he hasn’t a notion who the person is. Yet he can remember names and details of taste and character, and words and opinions and places vividly and at great length. He does his best to see people; but is constantly getting into trouble for not recognizing and saluting officers when they are out of uniform; for nobody is willing to believe his excuses.

He has never been dogmatic about any creed or political conviction: he has no belief in a philosophic Absolute. He has no use for crowds or any person whose only strength is that he is a member of some society or creed. He clearly also expects people to find themselves and be true to themselves, and to leave their neighbours to do the same: he would wish every man to be an everlasting question-mark. He can be relentless to the point of cruelty: the shock of his anger, which is a cold quiet laughing anger, is violent. To hear him, say, dismissing an impostor who claims to have served during the War in the East in such and such a unit, or reminding a bully of men deliberately sent to their death by him in such and such a province, is a terrifying experience. But when the offender is gone, the anger goes too and leaves no trace.