Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

By November Lawrence was back in Jarablus, fully recovered from his illness. Sir Frederick Kenyon of the British Museum had been persuaded to re-open the dig at Carchemish, partly because of the pressure whipped up in the press, much of it by the influential Hogarth. A letter published in The Timesin late July, entitled ‘Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia’, though, had also played its part, cleverly evoking British chauvinism by suggesting that the stones of ancient Carchemish were to be used as ballast for the German Berlin – Baghdad railway, which was about to reach the Euphrates. Although it was ascribed to an anonymous ‘Traveller’, this letter was actually the work of Lawrence: his first brilliant attempt to manipulate public opinion to his own advantage by using the establishment media. Kenyon had not only agreed to re-open the site, but had taken on Lawrence as a salaried assistant at 15s. a day. To replace Campbell-Thompson, who had decided to marry, he had appointed Lawrence’s old acquaintance, Leonard Woolley, as Director.

The German railway company was much in evidence on Lawrence’s return, constructing store-sheds and barracks for their workers in preparation for the wooden trestle bridge they planned to erect. Raff Fontana, the British Consul in Aleppo, had already told them in no uncertain terms that the Carchemish site was British property, and they were not to touch a single stone or blade of grass. The Germans, who had agreed to place the bridge slightly farther to the south, did not know that Fontana’s claim was false. Lawrence’s task in the district that November was to find out who the land actually didbelong to, which entailed delving into the government archives at Birejik, with the help of Haj Wahid and a dragoman from the British Consulate in Aleppo. What they discovered was not encouraging. Out of the entire area of 160 denumsof land, 120 belonged to a local landowner called Hassan Agha, while only forty had been purchased on behalf of the British Museum in 1879. Lawrence guessed that this situation would lead to problems in due course. His stay was a brief one, however, for he had made arrangements to work for a short period under Professor Flinders Petrie in Egypt, to improve his knowledge of archaeological field methods. He and Haj Wahid left Jarablus by coach on Christmas Day, 1911, in torrential rain. Crossing a footbridge over the Sajur, the coach slipped and overturned into the river, submerging one of the horses, pinning down another, and leaving the third thrashing about madly. Lawrence and the Haj, who had fortunately been walking ahead, plunged in to save their belongings, while the driver battled frantically to pull up the head of the drowning horse. Many of Lawrence’s things were carried off, and at one stage the Haj was almost washed away when he lost his footing and fell headlong into the torrent. It took two hours to extract the carriage in the freezing rain, and, as their lunch was well and truly soaked, they dined on a walnut each and an unlimited supply of muddy water. It was, said Lawrence, ‘the most memorable Christmas I’ve ever had’. ¹

He joined Petrie at Kafr Ammar, fifty miles up the Nile from Cairo, in January 1912. Though he had dreamed of Egypt as a boy, he found the Professor’s style too ordered and systematic for his taste, and disliked the work, which consisted mainly of disinterring heat-mummified bodies. Petrie, whom Lawrence had met briefly as a schoolboy at the Ashmolean, was the most distinguished British archaeologist of his day. No patrician Oxford sophisticate of the Hogarth school, he was a self-trained excavator who had begun as a humble surveyor without any systematic education, and had used his great gifts to transform the practice of Egyptology. Before Petrie, Egyptologists had been little more than glorified treasure-hunters, obsessed with uncovering temples and carrying off vast statues for museums. Petrie had been the first to turn his attention to the despised minutiae of archaeology: the scribble on a potsherd, the fragment of an amulet, the remains of a ring. His methods of dating included the use of stylistic degeneration, which later became standard practice. At close quarters Lawrence found Petrie monumental ‘like a cathedral’, and he was amused when, after he had turned up on the site in a blazer and shorts, the Professor told him bluntly: ‘They don’t play cricket here.’ Lawrence, who was wearing the same dress he had worn at Carchemish, realized that shorts were considered infra digin Egypt, though the reference to cricket made him chuckle: ‘I expect he meant football,’ he later wrote. ²He felt a great sense of admiration for Petrie, but thought him dogmatic and opinionated. He also developed a strong distaste for the Egyptians, who, unlike the Arabs of Jarablus, would not play the colonial game of reassuring the Englishman that they were not diminished by his power. Lawrence found them ugly, dirty, dull and gloomy and ‘without the vigour’ of the Jarablus men. He could not talk to them with the same ‘delicious free intimacy’, ³for either they were surly, reminding him of his status, or else they ‘took liberties’, ignoring it. Neither of these styles was acceptable to Lawrence, for the Arab was supposed to treat the Englishman with a rough and ready frankness which gave the illusion of equality, without overstepping the mark into disrespect. In Egypt the gulf between the powerful and the powerless was clear to see: in Syria it was comfortably disguised. These prejudices, and the ache to be back with his friends at Carchemish, did nothing to stymie his energy, and Petrie was impressed enough to offer him a salary of Ј700 to supervise a dig at Bahrein or somewhere else in the Persian Gulf. Lawrence was tempted, but the call of Syria proved too strong, and by the end of February he was back at Carchemish.

Woolley was tied up in Egypt till March, and Lawrence had orders to proceed with the building of an Expedition House as a permanent base. As soon as he reached Jarablus, he recruited twenty-two men and started on the foundations, but the work was halted by the Corporal commanding the Turkish guard which had been posted to the site since Lawrence’s last visit. The Corporal inquired politely if he had permission to build a house. Lawrence answered that his sponsors had been given permission and that the local Governor was perfectly aware of it. ‘Quite so,’ said the Corporal, ‘but that Governor is gone.’ ⁴There was no alternative but to suspend work while the Corporal wired Istanbul for permission, and a fortnight later Lawrence was still waiting for an answer. He travelled to Aleppo to meet Woolley, who arrived on 10 March expecting to find the house ready. He was irate when he discovered that work had not even begun, and whipped off a cable to Kenyon in London, demanding action. There was worse news to follow, however. When Lawrence and Woolley turned up at the site a few days later, and began enrolling workmen, they were told by the same Corporal that work was prohibited. Woolley dispatched a curt letter to the Governor asking him to curb the Corporal’s interference, and, confident that he would receive a prompt reply, proceeded to recruit 120 men. The Governor did not even deign to answer Woolley in person. Shortly, the Corporal arrived with a letter stating that the Governor did not know who Woolley was, and that work could under no circumstances commence. ‘This was a nasty shock,’ Woolley wrote; ‘… to put off the diggings now meant not only a waste of time, but would destroy the men’s confidence and respect – an important thing in a country none too civilised.’ ⁵

Woolley and Lawrence conferred and decided they must confront the Governor, and on 17 March they set off by horse for Birejik, twenty-five miles to the north. They crossed the Euphrates by ferry, and, leaving their mounts at the khan,marched briskly up the main street to the government serail,standing in the shadows of a twelfth-century castle. Woolley sent in his card to the Governor’s office. There was no reply, and after a decent interval, he sent in his card again. Minutes ticked past, and no response came. This was intolerable treatment for respectable British subjects, Woolley felt, and, bursting with righteous indignation, he and Lawrence forced their way into the Governor’s office and sat down unceremoniously in front of his desk. As decorously as possible, Woolley inquired why work on the site had been prohibited. The Governor, a corpulent, sly-looking old man with a goatee beard, replied that the firmangranting permission to excavate at the site was made out to a Mr D. G. Hogarth, and, since neither of the gentlemen in his presence appeared to bear that name, they could not be permitted to start work. Woolley protested that he had letters from Hogarth and the British Museum, but these letters were in English and the Governor waved them aside. He mightbe able to permit work to begin, he said, if the Englishmen were prepared to pay the salary of an unofficial commissaire. Both Woolley and Lawrence then realized that he was fishing for a large bribe. Just what happened next is uncertain. Woolley claimed that he leapt up, drew his pistol, held it to the Turk’s head, and threatened to shoot him there and then. It seems more likely, though, that he merely told him that work would proceed whether he liked it or not, upon which the Governor said he would send troops to prevent it.

‘I only hope that you will come at the head of your soldiers,’ Woolley said. ‘Then I shall have the pleasure of shooting you first!’ ⁶

‘So,’ said the Turk. ‘You would declare war on the Ottoman Empire!’

‘Not on the Ottoman Empire,’ Woolley replied coolly. ‘Only on the Governor of Birejik.’ ⁷

The Governor realized that his bluff had been called and caved in, declaring that he saw no reason why they could not start the following day, after all. This gunboat diplomacy had a great impact on Lawrence, for all his scorn of ‘ruling-race fantasies’, and he began to copy his new Director’s abrasive manner, just as he had tried to emulate Hogarth’s smoothness: ‘Woolley is really a most excellent person,’ he wrote to Edward Leeds. ‘You should have heard him last Sunday, regretting to the Governor of the Province that he was forced to shoot all soldiers who tried to interrupt our work at Carchemish and his sorrow that the first victim would have to be the little [Corporal].’ ⁸

They returned triumphantly to Carchemish, where their tiny army of workmen had manned the diggings with rifles and pistols to repel the Turks. On seeing the Englishmen riding backjaunty and unharmed, the Arabs cheered enthusiastically and let rip with salvoes of shots. Haj Wahid – whom Woolley had left in charge – put ten rounds from Lawrence’s own Mauser through the roof of his tent in glee. The racket drew a troop of German engineers, who rushed down to see what they thought was a battle, only to collide with a cavalcade of horsemen escorting the Governor in person. He had come only to deliver an official apology and to reassure everyone that work could commence, turning a blind eye to the building of the Expedition House, even though Lawrence had not yet received permission from Istanbul. No doubt inspired by his insouciance, Lawrence impudently wired to the capital again suggesting that it would be convenient to have permission to build the house beforeit had actually been completed.

The British had won the first round, but the Governor soon found a way to strike back. For the moment, though, they settled down to build their house, and Lawrence lifted a gloriously coloured and illustrated fifth-century Roman mosaic found in a field a mile away and installed it, piece by piece, as the living-room floor. The Expedition House became the ‘medieval hall’ he had dreamed about with Richards – a vast structure built round a courtyard, with no fewer than eleven rooms, including a dark-room. Lawrence practised the crafts he had learned as a youth to greater approval than he had received at home. He beat a bath and a firehood out of copper, built a table for the sitting-room, designed two armchairs which he had made for him in Aleppo, constructed basalt pillars and door mouldings, and eventually carved a mock-Hittite lintel over the door. He chose hangings and carpets, and crockery in the form of priceless Hittite pots and drinking-bowls, which he bought in neighbouring villages with Expedition funds, settling his conscience by resolving to let the Museum have anything which survived daily use. Descriptions of Lawrence at this time, indeed, portray him as something of a connoisseur – of carpets, Arab food, coffee, objets d’art, and other ‘beautiful things… to fill one’s house with’. ⁹Woolley said that the ‘evening Lawrence’ took on a very different aspect from the wild-haired youth of the day: ‘In the evening his hair was very carefully brushed,’ he wrote; ‘sitting in front of the winter fire reading… he would look with his sleek head and air of luxury extraordinarily unlike the Lawrence of the daytime.’ ¹⁰The centrepiece of the sitting-room was a William Morris tapestry sent out from Oxford, which became an endless source of amusement to Lawrence. When European visitors arrived, they would invariably pass over the exquisite Arab textiles he had collected, and stand gaping at the Morris. When they inquired in what remote bazaar he had obtained the marvellous stuff, Lawrence would take great delight in replying, ‘Oh, you can buy it in Oxford Street for so many shillings a yard!’ ¹¹

Woolley and Lawrence kept open house, and frequently invited the German engineers to dinner in civilized fashion. But though Lawrence’s fears about the railway company carting away the ancient stones of Carchemish as railway ballast proved unfounded, he continued to harbour a secret grudge against them. He resented them ostensibly because ‘they did not know how to treat Arabs’, but actually because they had intruded on his private sphere, and formed an alternative centre of attraction for the natives. Lawrence’s skills lay in ‘handling’ the Arabs, a task he performed by harnessing the British tradition of colonial paternalism, nurtured over centuries. The Germans preferred more Teutonic methods of control, but the end was essentially the same. Although Lawrence genuinely tried to see things from an Arab point of view, and did so more successfully than most, his technique of’empathy’ remained a method of control. He believed the traditional Arabs morally superior to Europeans because they were ‘primitive’ and therefore ‘innocent’, but not intellectually so. The reality of his privileged position was stated frankly when he wrote: ‘Really this country, for the foreigner, is too glorious for words: one is really the baron in the feudal system.’ ¹²His sense of rivalry with the Germans was submerged, however, for to begin with they lived in symbiosis. The engineers needed ballast for their railway, and the British needed to get rid of certain heaps of stones they had dumped in the previous season, in order to dig beneath them. It was agreed that the Germans would carry away the British stones, and the British would thus get their dumps moved without cost to themselves. This suited everyone admirably, except the part-owner of the site, Hassan Agha, who felt distinctly hard done by. One morning he strode into the German camp and demanded payment for his stones. The engineers explained that they could not pay and that if he insisted they would go elsewhere for their ballast. Hassan Agha then fled to Birejik to complain to the Governor, who suddenly saw his chance of revenge.

A few days later, a lone horseman arrived in the camp carrying a summons. Lawrence was to appear in an Islamic court accused of having stolen the goods of Hassan Agha – namely the stones – to the value of Ј30, and sold them to the Germans. The summons was technically illegal, since foreigners were exempt from appearance in an Islamic court, but Lawrence decided to attend the trial as a courtesy, simply because the charge was so absurd. On the appointed day he rode off to Birejik and in the court – part of the government serail– he produced two documents: an agreement signed by Hassan Agha relinquishing rights to anything found on the site, and an affidavit signed by the German Chief Engineer, swearing that nothing had been paid for the stones. Lawrence also had with him documents authorizing their work at Carchemish. These papers, he thought, should be enough in themselves to have the case dismissed. He had reckoned without the machinations of the Governor, however, and was shocked when the prosecuting counsel produced six witnesses prepared to swear that the dumps had been paid for. The counsel asked to see all Lawrence’s documents and promptly confiscated them, leaving him bureaucratically naked. He arrived back at Carchemish that night far less contented than he had been on his departure. The work continued as before, however, until the Governor ordered the Corporal to post guards on the gate. Woolley managed to sidestep this development by taking the German-employed donkey-men on his own payroll, and having them dump the stones near the German lines.

On the day fixed for the full hearing, Woolley, Lawrence and Haj Wahid, festooned with carbines and revolvers as if on a tribal raid, made for Birejik. To their surprise, they ran into Hassan Agha coming in the opposite direction, who told them that the case had been adjourned. Woolley refused to accept it, envisaging more exasperating delays, and they pressed on to Birejik, where they demanded to see the Governor. Woolley explained that they could not afford to keep halting work on the dig to ride to Birejik, and insisted that the case be heard that day as planned. The Governor seemed friendly and compliant, and neither Lawrence nor Woolley guessed his part in the plot. In the courtroom next door, a crowd had gathered to watch the fun, and a scribe took copious notes. Woolley stood up, announced that he was taking full responsibility for the case, and declared that the prosecution had no witnesses. The prosecuting counsel then asked the court for a week’s adjournment to find some, a proposal the judge agreed to at once despite Woolley’s violent protests. Woolley was incensed. He refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction and called loudly for the Governor. The judge laughed in his face, and told him that it was the Governor himself who held the papers authorizing work on the site. Only at that moment did Woolley realize what lay behind the conspiracy: ‘The trick that had been played on us and the Governor’s part in it were now quite clear,’ he wrote. ‘As long as they had the precious documents… I was at his mercy.’ ¹³Woolley saw that a return to gunboat diplomacy was called for, and drew his pistol, declaring that ‘the Judge would not leave the room alive’ unless he got his papers back. The judge’s sneer froze on his lips, and he sank back into his chair. Woolley told Lawrence to go to the Governor’s office next door and demand the papers: ‘Woolley kept him in his place,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘while I went to the [Governor] and pointed out how unpleasant the position of the [Judge] was …,’ ¹⁴Woolley recalled that Lawrence was gone only a few minutes and reappeared brandishing the papers, saying, ‘The blighter had them all in his own desk!’ ¹⁵When Woolley asked if there had been any trouble, Lawrence answered, ‘None’, except that the Governor had wanted a copy of Hassan Agha’s contract made, ‘And could you oblige him with a penny for the stamp!’

The affair was not quite finished, however. In May, when Hogarth arrived to take stock of the situation, he called on the Governor, who tendered his apparently sincere apologies and informed him solicitously ‘that he had used his authority to quash a case that should never have been brought’. Evidently this had not been made clear to the procession of soldiers which arrived at the Expedition House the following Sunday with a paper for Woolley’s inspection. The paper showed the verdict of the court – ‘guilty’ – and announced the sentence – payment of Ј30 plus costs. Woolley’s reaction was prompt: ‘I tore it into small pieces,’ he remembered, ‘and the procession went disconsolately back.’ ¹⁶

Kenyon’s original intention had been to run the dig for only a short season, and as yet only two inscriptions had been unearthed. In May, though, Hogarth announced the wonderful news that an anonymous donor – actually a wealthy businessman named Walter Morrison – had donated Ј5,000 to support the excavations. The work could now continue indefinitely, and Lawrence decided not to go back to England that summer as he had planned, but to remain on the site to ‘keep an eye on the Germans’. A major reason for this change of plan was that Dahoum, whom he had wanted to take back to Oxford with him, had declined the invitation. Lawrence decided to put off his return until after the winter season. The site was closed in June, and he was frankly relieved to see Woolley off from Alexandretta: ‘I am my own master again,’ he wrote, ‘which is a position which speaks for itself and its goodness.’ ¹⁷He rested for a few days in Aleppo, then returned to Jarablus, where he now enjoyed complete autonomy. His first move was to install Dahoum in the Expedition House, ostensibly to help Haj Wahid’s mother, who worked in the kitchen, but actually to assuage his loneliness. He occupied his time by holding impromptu classes in arithmetic and geography – the itch to improve once more outweighing his admiration for the ‘unspoiled Arab’. In geography, he taught his four students that the earth was round, eliciting the predictable question from one of them that if this was the case, how was it that the people on the other side did not fall off? The school soon had to be abandoned, however, when Lawrence went down with yet another dose of malaria, and no sooner had he recovered than Dahoum succumbed, followed by Haj Wahid’s wife and his baby son. The Haj himself later took to his bed with intestinal problems after a drinking bout, and Lawrence doctored them all.

At the end of August, though, he suffered two more spells of malaria, and abandoned his resolution to remain at Jarablus all summer. He moved to Jebayyil on the Mediterranean coast, staying once again with Miss Holmes at the American Mission, where he had been made so welcome previously. This time he took Dahoum with him as his cook and servant. He later told Robert Graves that he and Dahoum had enjoyed a wonderful summer, masquerading as camel-drivers, sailing down the Syrian coast, helping peasants with the harvest, bathing and sight-seeing. In his contemporary letters he described this period as the most glorious summer he had ever had. That they actually passed themselves off as camel-men is doubtful, since Lawrence scarcely knew one end of a camel from the other at this stage, and Dahoum was little better. Certainly, though, Lawrence walked about Jebayyil in native dress, went sight-seeing to the famous Qasr of Ibn Wardan in the Orontes valley, and bathed in the sea with Dahoum almost every day. He was blissful: free at last, alone but for a boy he was devoted to, eating well, sleeping well, reading in the Mission library, and practising his Arabic. All his life he had hidden his feelings for others, repressed his emotions, stood aloof. With Dahoum – a ‘savage’, still little more than a child – he was able to open up completely as he could not do with anyone of his own age, race and status. With Dahoum, he felt unthreatened. He felt so close to the boy, in fact, that there was no need to play the fool or practise ‘whimsicalities’. With Dahoum, he did not feel out of his depth as he did with other, more conventionally ‘masculine’ men. He felt so absolutely comfortable with him that they were able to sit in silence together for hours, basking in each other’s warmth, not needing even to speak. His power over Dahoum was profound, and to the boy he must have appeared almost a wizard from a far-off land, a kind of magical godfather glimpsed only in fairy-tales. The relationship was not and could never be one of equality: socially they were as far apart, almost, as medieval serf and master – at least, this is the way Lawrence himself imagined it: ‘Dahoum is very useful now, though a savage,’ he wrote later that year; ‘however, we are here in the feudal system, which gives the overlord great claims: so that I have no trouble with him.’ ¹⁸The boy whom Lawrence had a year previously acclaimed for his ability to read and write remained, in his eyes, a ‘savage’ whose most appealing qualities were his honesty and strength, and, not least, his ability to wrestle: ‘beautifully better than all of his age and size’. ¹⁹It was Dahoum’s ‘innocence’ which Lawrence appreciated most, by which he meant an innocence of the political realities of the world and the vast gulf of culture and economic power that lay between them. Lawrence despised more sophisticated Arabs because they were likely to question the European assumption of authority, which Dahoum, in his ‘innocence’, did not. In short, Lawrence saw Dahoum as a beautiful boy who was entirely dependent on his own noblesse obligeand did not appear to resent it. Here was the perfect romantic subject for the most precious gift that Lawrence, in his omnipotent wizardry, could bestow: freedom – ‘the seven pillared worthy house’. Lawrence was utterly in love with this young boy, and for him he felt empowered to shift mountains, to inspire great tides of movement. His poem, most probably dedicated to Dahoum – Salim Ahmad – ‘I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars’, must rank as one of the most moving tributes to young love ever written.

It may have been his feeling for Dahoum which prompted him to exchange clothes with him. By slipping into his dishdashahe could magically becomeDahoum, become for a moment the innocent and ignorant ‘savage’ living close to the earth, become the long-admired craftsman of the medieval era, inhabiting a pre-Renaissance, pre-rational world. Lawrence, whose inner emptiness prompted him to take on the characteristics of others he met, was to spend his life searching for alternative selves. In Dahoum, he discovered his most potent alter ego– a persona he could step into and out of as he wished. At last, the obsessions of his youth – the medieval, the Morrisian fantasy – began to coalesce in the overwhelming fascination and delight of being that ‘baron in the feudal system’, a European in the East: ‘I don’t think anyone who has tasted the East as I have would give it up halfway,’ he wrote. ²⁰His happiness made him oblivious to or uncaring about the scandal he was provoking, especially in the breast of the committed Evangelist Miss Holmes, who had welcomed Lawrence first as a devoted fellow Christian, a member of an Evangelical family, who in 1909 had waxed enthusiastically about the triumphs of her Mission. That shy, earnest, undergraduate of 1909 had metamorphosed before her eyes into a new, more self-assertive man who denounced foreign interference, flaunted his handsome companion, and strutted about wearing native dress. Miss Holmes, who had given up her holiday in the cooler mountains, was unimpressed with his new manner and his dashing young friend. Lawrence later claimed that she had been unable to understand Dahoum’s Jarablus dialect – the dialect which he himself had called Vile’, and which in Dahoum’s golden mouth had acquired the melodious sound of ancient Greek. It is unlikely, though, that the Near East veteran Miss Holmes could not have communicated with the boy had she wished. Evidently, she did not find Dahoum the ‘excellent material’ Lawrence had so proudly assured her colleague Miss Rieder he was. Lawrence never stayed at the Mission again, nor did he receive any further letters from Miss Holmes. When he passed through Beirut in February 1913, a visit to Jebayyil was notably absent from his schedule.