Текст книги "Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia "

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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His father’s generosity was matched by that of the Earl Curzon,† who was a former viceroy of India and then chancellor of the University of Oxford (and with whom Lawrence would clash bitterly after the war, when Curzon was foreign secretary). At the urging of the head of Lawrence’scollege, Curzon persuaded the Ottoman government to issue the necessary irades—essentially letters of safe conduct to be shown to the local authorities—without which travel in the more remote parts of the Ottoman Empire was very difficult.

In our own age, when a journey to even the most faraway places is measured in hours and when young people backpack all over the world and keep in touch by cell phone, it is hard to imagine just how isolated and primitive the Ottoman Empire once was. The Turkish railway system, most of it financed and built by the Germans, was still makeshift and primitive, and whole sections had yet to be built. To travel from Haidar Pasha, on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, the starting point of the Baghdad Railway, to Baghdad, nearly 900 miles away, it was necessary to leave the train and take to donkey, horse, or mule twice, since two important tunnels remained uncompleted; and the lines to the south were of different gauges, so that passengers and goods had to be unloaded and reloaded at several points. In addition, there were still only single-line tracks, which enormously complicated the task of moving rail traffic in two directions. This alone made travel in the Ottoman Empire a daunting proposition.

Hospitals were few, far between, and primitive; diseases such as cholera and malaria were rife; sanitation was lacking outside hotels de grand luxe in the major cities; roads were mostly dirt tracks; and south and east of Damascus the Arabs made a practice of robbing strangers. Except for Constantinople, a big and cosmopolitan city, life in most of the Ottoman Empire was still ruled by family, clan, or tribe; and much of the empire was inhabited by rival or warring nationalities and ethnic groups. The “Young Turks” who had taken power in 1908 were determined to modernize the country, but progress was slow, and deeply resisted. Over the decades, the Ottoman Empire had been driven out of Europe, and subjected to any number of humiliating concessions. Under one such concession, foreigners were tried according to the laws of their own country, rather than those of Turkey; as a result, both the Turks who ruled the empireand the Arabs who resented the presence of all foreigners were deeply hostile to the western powers.

Still, all this must be set against the spontaneous generosity of all the ethnic groups in the empire, especially the Arabs, to whom hospitality to a stranger was (and remains) both a religious obligation and a matter of honor. They managed, however, to combine this with a voracious appetite for theft—so long as you were not a guest under their roof, or in their tent, you were fair game. Thus it was that Lawrence received food and a night’s lodging, however poor his host, but was also shot at, robbed, and badly beaten. Missionaries of numerous denominations and nationalities, including Americans, Scots, and Jews, also offered him hospitality. In all his lengthy letters home Lawrence benefited from the fact that the British and most of the major European powers ran their own post offices and postal services in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish post office being notoriously unreliable. His letters give no hint of homesickness, fear, complaint, or self-doubt. He walked more than 1,000 miles, mostly on rough, rocky paths, for up to thirteen hours a day in temperatures ranging from ninety to 107 degrees, and visited the sites of thirty-six crusader castles—an extraordinary achievement.

He left England on June 18, 1909, on board the P&O liner SS Mongolia. It made only two short stops, at Gibraltar and Marseille, then went on to Port Said, where he was stuck for five nights in one of the most raucous and sordid ports on earth waiting for a berth on a ship to Beirut. He spent most of his time on board studying Arabic, and although he dismissed the voyage as “a monstrous waste of time,” he seems to have enjoyed the variegated company at his table on the Mongolia: “a French girl & a German male, a Swede, two Spaniards, an Indian of some sort, an Italian, an Arab, and a Greek. Swede, & Hindu talk English.” He reached Port Said on June 30, and reported home by letter that he enjoyed good bathing on the beach; had seen the Suez Canal; and was eating melons, peaches, apricots, and grapes—and that nevertheless Port Said was “a horrible place” (few travelers will disagree). He did not arrive in Beirut until July 6—eighteen days for a journey that would now take six hours.

From the beginning, he set himself a demanding pace, averaging about twenty miles on foot a day. Although he is usually portrayed as an instinctive loner, he had actually made plans in Beirut to go with a party of five American tutors at the American College there, but one of them fell ill, so they dropped out and he went on alone. He had no trouble finding places to stay, either in native homes or at missions, though he remarks on the number of flea bites he picked up—inevitably, since most Palestinian houses were built on two levels, the higher end for the family, and the lower one for the animals, both under one roof. He praised the food even in the most modest homes: leben, a kind of thin yogurt, eaten by dipping a piece of rolled-up bread into the bowl; two kinds of bread, one small and dusted with sesame seeds and cumin, which he liked, and the other a very thin, flat, round bread, sometimes three feet in diameter and very dry and brittle, which he didn’t. He always offered to pay; sometimes money was accepted, but mostly it was not. His letters home could serve as models for anybody writing about travel and adventure off the beaten path, and there is in them, though he seldom gets credit for it, a certain sweetness toward people, a desire to believe the best of them until they proved otherwise. He always radiated a powerful, even incandescent enthusiasm and curiosity that seemed to light up everything he saw, however weary, footsore, or sick he was.

And sick he was, quite often—he had already contracted malaria on his bike trip through the south of France, and now he contracted a different and more serious strain; his feet gave him endless trouble; his face and hands were burned and chapped by the heat and the wind; he was covered with insect bites from head to foot; and he clearly didn’t care.

Those who have not read Lawrence’s letters home, to his parents and to his brothers, can have no idea of just how likable he was, and how far removed from the neurotic figure, obsessed by his own illegitimacy, whom some of his biographers and critics have described. What is more, his letters reveal an enviable family picture—there is not a hint of jealousy between the brothers, and his parents are interested in every single thing that Ned does. However fierce the psychological tug-of-war wasbetween Sarah and her second son—a contest that Ned could never win, but that he learned to avoid by putting as much distance as he could between himself and his mother—their concern for each other and his efforts to please her are clear. Simply by being in the Holy Land, of course, he was pleasing her as he could never have done by traveling in France, no matter how many miles he rode a day, or how few shillings a day he spent on himself.

It is, one assumes, largely for her benefit that his letters are not just about local customs and crusaders’ fortresses, but are shot through with biblical references: “From Dan we passed to the site of Abel-Beth-Maachah, where Sheba was finally run to earth by Joab.” Lawrence never neglects to point out each of the biblical sites he visits, though these sites are not his primary interest, of course; and he displays throughout his letters an amazing amount of biblical knowledge—perhaps not so extraordinary for somebody brought up in a family with daily Bible readings. He notes that he has stood on the place where the Arabs believe Jonah was cast ashore, and describes a beautiful spring dedicated by the Greeks to Pan in the village of Banias (on the Golan Heights), which “Mother will remember from Matthew xvi or Mark viii and other places.”

Given Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the Arab cause, it is interesting that he remarks about Palestine: “The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert.” After describing the primitive farming methods of the Arabs, he notes by contrast that he has just heard the news of Louis Blйriot’s first crossing of the Channel by airplane. Lawrence has great sympathy for the Arabs, but a brisk impatience with the Turks, whom he sees, correctly, as retarding political development and education, and imposing on all subject races of the empire a bureaucracy that is slow moving, corrupt, and punitive. Although he has yet to meet the Bedouin, or even to see the desert—for he is trudging up and down the stony hills of what is now Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, climbing, as he remarks wearily (and with pardonable exaggeration), the height of Mont Blanc every day—he notes with approval the farmers “ploughing intheir fields” with a revolver on their belt or a rifle over their shoulder, and the occasional appearance of a desert Arab in a kufiyya. As if it were a premonition of many a page in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he writes of the heat in northern Palestine: “Inland, up the mountains, it is cooler, though when one gets among the large rocks one is stifled: they seem almost to give off a vapour, or heat-breath, that is horrible; add to that a sirocco, a wind that shrivels every green thing it meets, that blisters one’s face & hands, & makes one feel that one is walking towards some gigantic oven; and you get an idea of the vast possibilities.” Since he adds that the shaded hallway of the hotel in Tiberias, even though cooled by a large block of ice, was over 106 degrees, and that it felt “quite cool” compared with the temperature outside in the sun, gives some idea of what Lawrence had in mind by unbearable heat.

It was not only heat that didn’t bother Lawrence—he was also exposed to the sudden violence of the Middle East, and took a certain delight in the experience. His attitude was similar to that of the young Winston Churchill: “Nothing in life is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” Lawrence, who was destined to form with Churchill both an effective team at the Colonial Office and a lifelong mutual admiration society, took much the same delight in the crack of bullets whipping past his head, and had his first experience of it near Aleppo, in what is now Syria. More remarkably, while he tried to pass the incident off with lighthearted good humor in a letter to his mother, he made no attempt to hide what had happened from her, when it would presumably have been very easy to do so by simply not mentioning it.

In Latakia, he had spent the night in the house of a young Arab nobleman, Abdul Kerim, who had just acquired a Mauser pistol similar to Lawrence’s, and amused himself by blazing away from his fortresslike house on a hill at the surrounding villages. A few days later, while Lawrence was on his way to Aleppo, over “the worst road on the face of the globe,” “an ass with an old gun” on a horse took a shot at him from about 200 yards. Since Lawrence was wearing a suit and shoes, and on foot, it would have been obvious that he was a European—the man with the gunmay have felt it was his religious duty to take a potshot at an infidel, or perhaps intended more practically to rob Lawrence, or perhaps both. Lawrence fired back and grazed the horse, which bolted and carried its rider about 800 yards away (not a bad snap shot with a pistol at 200 yards). Lawrence then carefully put up his rear sight as high it would go and fired a shot right over the man’s head,* prompting him to gallop away as fast as he could ride, astonished that “a person with nothing but a pistol could shoot so far.”

Lawrence complained to the governor of the district, who sent all his police out to search for the man, with (of course) no results; one thinks of the police chief’s weary order in Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” The consensus was that Lawrence’s assailant had hoped to bluff him into paying for a safe passage; if so, that was certainly a misreading of Lawrence’s character.

Lawrence was intending to walk to Damascus, but a succession of events persuaded him to end his journey in Aleppo. He wrote home to explain that one of the newspapers in Aleppo had reported his murder, in a village where he had never been, so that he was treated “like a ghost” by the hotel staff and the local missionaries; then his boots had given up the ghost at last, exposing his feet to “cuts & chafes & blisters” which seemed unlikely to heal in this climate; finally, his camera was stolen (more trouble for the unfortunate police, who now had on their hands a British subject who had been shot at by a native, was reported to have been murdered, and had lodged a complaint about a stolen camera). In the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence best to go home. He was in any case down to the last of his money, he had just recovered from his fourth bout of malaria, and the rainy season was about to begin, so he left with few regrets. He prudently sent a letter to Sir John Rhys, the principal of Jesus College, to explain that he would be returning late, while also very wisely asking his father to go to Jesus and explain matters to the authorities in person. (“Sir John does not like to be bothered with college matters,” Lawrence warned his father.)

In his letter to Sir John Rhys, however, Lawrence mentioned that he had been “robbed and rather smashed up,” something which he had neglected to tell his parents, and which may have been the deciding factor in persuading him to return home, rather than the state of his shoes. Apparently, the shooting incident had not been the only attack on Lawrence: while trying to purchase Hittite seals on Hogarth’s behalf in a village near the Euphrates, he was followed and set upon by an importunate beggar, who had been attracted by Lawrence’s cheap copper watch. Thinking that it was gold, the man stalked Lawrence and hit him on the head with a rock on the deserted road, knocking him down. He then robbed Lawrence and tried to shoot him with the Mauser. Fortunately for Lawrence, the operation of the cocking bolt and the safety catch of a Mauser C96 are confusing even to experienced owners of the pistol, so the thief was unable to shoot. Instead, Lawrence’s assailant bashed him about the head again and made off with all his possessions, biting his hand severely in the fight, and leaving him for dead. Lawrence recovered enough to walk five miles to the next town, where the local authorities and (perhaps more important) the “village elders” quickly found the guilty man—no doubt they already knew who he was—and returned to Lawrence his watch, his seals, his pistol, and his money. Lawrence thanked Rhys for having helped procure the irades (safe-conduct letters) from the Ottoman government, without which the shooting incident and the attack on him might have been far more difficult to resolve, and also asked Rhys not to mention his injuries to his father.

The robbery has caused considerable difficulty for biographers, since Lawrence wrote or told several variants of it to different people. Thus, in Robert Graves’s biography of Lawrence the Mauser becomes a Colt, the safety catch of which the robber didn’t know how to move; in Liddell Hart’s biography it becomes an old Webley revolver,* which the robber inadvertently rendered unfireable by pulling out the trigger guard; and in both these versions the robber is interrupted by a passing shepherd before he can finish Lawrence off. However it happened, it must have been a frightening experience, even for somebody as stoic and fatalistic as Lawrence, and would explain both why he decided to go home and why he went all the way back by ship, instead of much more quickly by ship to Marseille and then by train: he would have wanted his wounds to heal as much as possible before his family saw him. This attack may have been the one reported, in garbled form, in the Aleppo newspaper, causing people to believe he was dead. That it did happen is certain. Apart from the fading scars, when Lawrence returned C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon’s annotated map to him, he apologized for the bloodstain on it, and in any case there is nothing intrinsically unlikely about the attack.

Lawrence may or may not have worked as a coal checker in Port Said to help pay for his way home, and may or may not have sold his Mauser in Beirut for the same reason (though if he did sell it, as has been claimed, for only Ј5, he made a very poor deal for such an expensive weapon); but somehow he managed to reach home in one piece and, most important of all, with his enthusiasm for the Middle East undiminished.

What might have seemed to most travelers two lucky escapes, and a good reason not to repeat the experience, merely whetted Lawrence’s appetite. Already it was clear to him that he did not want to become a don, or spend his life cataloging potsherds and glass fragments at the Ashmolean; he wanted both the freedom that only an alien world could offer him, and the adventurous life of a man of action. Just as hardship, physical challenge, and self-discipline had developed from habits into addictions, danger too became addictive. Of course to the would-be hero every assault and life-threatening encounter is merely a challenge to be overcome, a step forward in his apprenticeship—the more frighteningand the more physically punishing, the better, provided he survives. Perhaps without realizing it, Lawrence had taken his first steps on that path, as if he had already heard, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “a cry (if not from the housetops, then—more miserably—within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land.”

That land was not to be found among the gray spires of Oxford.

The college raised no difficulties about Lawrence’s return a week late—an unusual and physically demanding journey through the Holy Land by an undergraduate would have seemed more important than his arriving home on time; and even the dons could hardly fail to notice that he was emaciated and toughened by his experiences. One of them described Lawrence’s face as “thinned to the bone by privation.” He settled back into the routine of college life, but he was infected by more than malaria—henceforth, Lawrence’s mind was firmly fixed on the Middle East, and on finding a way to get back there for a longer time. He may not have wanted to break the news yet to Richards, but hand-printing beautiful books in a William Morris cottage in the woods (or a windmill by the sea, an alternative version of this plan) was no longer Lawrence’s goal.

After his journey, life in the tiny cottage in the garden of 2 Polstead Road too must have seemed more cramped and confining than before, and Oxford a place of narrow vistas, gray sky, and penetrating cold. Many undergraduates stumble through their third and last year at Oxford dazed by the ordeal of the final examination that lies ahead of them, and still more by the question of what they are going to do with themselves when they leave Oxford, but Lawrence was already determined to find a way back to the Middle East, and merely saw his finals as a necessary step on the way. He needed not only a “First,” but more: an interesting and provocative First; and he reenlisted his patient crammer L. C. Jane to ensure that he was well prepared. He had until the Easter vacation of 1910 to hand in his thesis, and though he boasted later of preparing it at the very last minute, the evidence seems to be that he prepared very carefullyindeed. He had it typed (typing was rare at the time), and it included a large number of maps, plans, drawings, photographs, and even postcards, which backed up his view that the crusaders had brought their architecture to the Middle East, rather than being influenced by what they found there.

He had persuaded Hogarth to write a letter of introduction to C. M. Doughty, who was to become another of Lawrence’s father figures, and now it bore fruit. The meeting between Lawrence and the old man was a success, and, in Hogarth’s words, “in no way diminished the disciple’s fervor.” In fact it served to increase Lawrence’s determination to follow in Doughty’s footsteps.

Lawrence did not seem to have had any doubts about his thesis, except for the fear that it might be too ambitious and too long for the examiners. Indeed, the material in it was so new and challenging that there was at first some doubt that anybody at Oxford was competent to judge it. In the event, Lawrence “took a most brilliant First Class,” according to his crammer L. C. Jane, so brilliant that Lawrence’s tutor gave a dinner party to the examiners to celebrate the achievement. This rare, and possibly unique, event in Oxford demonstrates the respect in which Lawrence was held, despite doubt that he was “a natural scholar.”

Afterward, Lawrence set off on a cycling tour in France with his brother Frank, who appears not to have shared Ned’s interest in castles and fortifications. Ned wrote to his mother that he was busy reading Petit Jehan de Saintrй, “a xv Cent. Novel of knightly manners,” of which he had been trying to find a well-printed copy, as well as the work of “Moliиre & Racine & Corneille & Voltaire,” an ambitious reading program for somebody bicycling almost fifty miles a day. He pauses to explain to his mother his passion for reading, and for beautiful books. “Father won’t know all this—but if you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys—not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one’s miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man’s thought. And you can never be quite the old self again.”

What Sarah made of all this is hard to know—as so often with Lawrence’s letters home, it reads as if he were trying out ideas and phrases that he intended to develop, refine, and use later, perhaps in this case for a letter to his friend Vyvyan Richards, who still expected Lawrence to join him in the hand-printing venture; or perhaps Lawrence was merely trying to persuade his mother that the plan for printing books with Richards was a better one than his father thought.

On his return to Oxford Lawrence was persuaded by C. F. Bell to go for a bachelor of literature (BLitt) degree as the next rung up on the academic ladder, his subject to be “Mediaeval Lead-Glazed Pottery from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries.” Although he twice failed to win “a research fellowship” at All Souls College, he managed to get a grant of Ј50 from Jesus College, but one senses that his heart was not really in the problems of lead-glazed pottery, however much they fascinated Bell.

Even though he left immediately for Rouen, to look “at mediaeval pots,” Lawrence also dropped what must have been a bombshell for his friend E. T. Leeds and for Bell, who had envisioned him safely seated at a desk in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, examining potsherds on his return from France. “Mr. Hogarth is going digging, and I am going out to Syria in a fortnight to make plain the valleys and level the mountains for his feet:—also to learn Arabic,” he informed them. “The two occupations fit into one another splendidly.”

“The dangerous crises of self-development are permitted to come to pass under the protecting eye of an experienced initiate … who then enacts the role and character of the ancient mystagogue, or guide of souls,” wrote Joseph Campbell in analyzing the development of the hero, and the need, at the crucial stages of the hero’s life, for a wise, firm, and knowing mentor—one who sets the apprentice hero on the correct path and furnishes him with the knowledge and the weapons he will need, and who, above all, points to the great task that lies at the end of the many trials and terrors.

Nobody would have been more familiar with the role Merlin played in the life of King Arthur than Lawrence, whose appetite for medieval romance, myth, and poetry was voracious, and who would carry Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur into battle with him. Henceforth, Hogarth would play that role in Lawrence’s life.

In the meantime, it is clear, Lawrence was delighted to be freed from the pottery fragments in the Ashmolean, and sent to Syria. He sailed on December 10, 1909, for Beirut, and what would be the happiest years of his life.

* A typical case of the latter kind was the dislike between the future poet laureate and television celebrity John Betjeman and his tutor at Magdalen College, C. S. Lewis, author of, among other things, The Narnia Chronicles. Lewis called Betjeman an “idle prig” and was instrumental in sending him down, and Betjeman later described Lewis as arid, unsympathetic, and uninspiring, and blamed his failure at oxford on Lewis.

* At Bexleyheath, south of London.

* This may not have been true, however, on Clare’s part, to Lawrence’s great embarrassment.

* Although Graves too was an oxonian, there is some doubt that he got this right. Mark Blandford-Baker, the home bursar of Magdalen College, oxford, points out, “Balliol is surrounded by trinity plus a bit of St. John’s.” Lawrence may have been pulling Graves’s leg.

* Lawrence is fairly specific about this, though he seems to have carried several different kinds of pistols over the years. if his reference to the Mauser is true, then it is exactly the same kind of pistol which the young Winston Churchill carried when he charged with the twenty-First Lancers at the Battle of omdurman in the Sudan, Kitchener’s great victory, in 1898, and with which he shot several Mahdist tribesmen.

† he was created marquess of Curzon in 1921.

* This pretty much confirms that the pistol he carried was a Mauser C96–no other pistol had adjustable sights calibrated for up to 1,000 meters, which made sense because the pistol could be carried in a wooden holster that clipped to the butt serving as a stock, thus allowing it to be fired like a carbine. it was, however, a bulky and heavy weapon, not easily concealable, and would seem to prove that Lawrence must have carried more than what he could stuff into his pockets.

* In the Lowell Thomas version the pistol becomes a Colt.45 Peacemaker, which the robber doesn’t realize has to be cocked with the thumb before firing; but this may be a sop to American readers–Lawrence clearly identifies it as a Mauser.

CHAPTER FIVE

Carchemish: 1911–1914

We travel not for trafficking alone:

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.—James Elroy Flecker, “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” David Hogarth, though he seems to have had a gift for remaining in the background, was one of those figures beloved in English popular fiction: the superbly well-connected don; a scholar who was also an intrepid traveler and “a man of action"; an Englishman who could speak French, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Arabic fluently, and who was just as at ease negotiating with foreign governments and institutions as he was with those of his own country. Though married, and the father of a son, Hogarth was apparently not an enthusiast for domestic life; he was an inveterate and intrepid traveler, as well as a learned, witty, acerbic man, as much at home in high society as he was in the desert, a brilliant conversationalist in all his languages, and “respected throughout Europe” as well as in much of the Middle East. It comes as no surprise to learn that Hogarth and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, were at Winchester together and had remained in constant touch since their schooldays there.

When Lawrence went up to Jesus College in 1907 as an undergraduate, he was nineteen and Hogarth was forty-five and already a man of considerable accomplishments: a fellow of Magdalen College, he was the author of several well-received books; he had taken part in archaeological expeditions in Egypt, Crete, and Asia Minor; he had been director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens (an extremely prestigious post); he had served as a war correspondent for the Times during the 1897 revolution in Crete and the Greco-Turkish War—a hint that there was more to Hogarth’s life than archaeology—and he would become keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1909. Hogarth was one of those people who knew everybody worth knowing, and was welcome everywhere. A big, burly, sociable, broad-shouldered man, with a neatly trimmed beard, unusually long, powerful arms, and a dark, penetrating gaze, he was described by a woman who met him at a party as resembling “a cynical and highly-educated baboon.” In rare photographs of himself and Lawrence together, he towers over Lawrence by a head. A member of what has come to be called in Britain the Establishment,* he was also an academic talent spotter, and the first to recognize in the young Lawrence the same quickness of mind, biting sense of humor, and sharp intellectual curiosity that had brought the young Hogarth himself a brilliant “First.” He described Lawrence in a letter to Charles M. Doughty, the great explorer of Arabia, as “a boy of extraordinary aptitude both for archaeology and a wandering life among the Arabs.” With great patience and tact he shaped the younger man’s career, almost always as a presence in the background, sometimes without Lawrence’s even being aware of it. As early as 1909, Hogarth remarked to E. T. Leeds, one of his archaeological assistants at the Ashmolean, about Lawrence, who was then just back from his first visit to the Middle East: “That’s a rather remarkable young man: he has been in parts rarely visited by Western travelers in recent years.”