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

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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In the same letter, Lawrence rather vaguely sketches out his future plans—he hopes to go to “Asia Minor” in July and August, to pay a two-week visit to England in early September, and to return to Carchemish with his brother Will. He reports that he has been asked by the Turks to dig for “Arab glazed ware” in Mesopotamia, a signal honor, given their distrust of foreigners, and a sign that Lawrence’s reputation as a specialist in pottery was growing in the scientific community—indeed, in mid-June he mentions that he is sending 11,000 pottery fragments back to Leeds at the Ashmolean, to be sorted and reassembled. He also boasts that it is already 109 degrees indoors in a darkened room, although the floor has been sprinkled with water—"a pleasant, healthy warmth,” as he puts it. But then Lawrence’s notion of comfortable warmth was very different from that of most Europeans: he relished heat, the hotter the better, and the only sensual indulgence he permitted himself throughout his lifewas frequent very hot baths, which he also recommended to his family as a precaution against influenza.

His interest in shooting remained strong—sensibly, perhaps, in view of the seething among the local Kurds—and he reported back to his brother Frank, also an excellent shot, that in a contest with a visiting British diplomat he had put five shots out of seven into a medjidie (a Turkish coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece) “at 25 yards with an automatic colt” (presumably the nickel-plated.32 Colt Dahoum is holding in the photograph Lawrence took of him). This is remarkably good, considering that Lawrence was “fast shooting without dropping the hand,” that is, emptying the magazine rapidly rather than carefully target-shooting, and putting three shots out of ten into an orange box at 1,200 yards with his Mannlicher carbine. Not many people could hit anything at a range of 1,200 yards with a carbine, and this certainly represents a standard of marksmanship not usually found among Oxford scholars—as well as a sign that Lawrence’s growing skill and interest in archaeology were unlikely to land him behind a desk at the Ashmolean Museum.

He adds, at the end of this letter, “Hope to bring 2 Arabs with me this summer,” and he did so, both as a reward to Sheikh Hamoudi and Dahoum for saving his life when he was suffering from dysentery, and perhaps also because of the fuss and interest he knew they would cause in Oxford, where they lodged in the garden cottage at 2 Polstead Road. Already there had been protests from both his parents about his casual mention that at Carchemish Friday was his Sunday—that is, Lawrence had adopted the Muslim and Jewish holy day of the week, rather than trying to impose the Christian day on his workforce or simply taking Sunday off to observe it by himself. His parents surely took this as a sign of religious backsliding. The shortness of his visit home—he was there only ten days—and the proximity of Hamoudi and Dahoum, neither of whom spoke a word of English, were perfectly calculated, as his mother must have guessed, to prevent any serious questions from her about his lifestyle, his future intentions, or his current religious belief.

What the two Arabs thought of Oxford is hard to know, but Oxfordwas fascinated by them. They learned to ride a bicycle, and caused a stir by cycling through the Oxford streets in their eastern robes. Dahoum had his portrait drawn by Francis Dodd, a friend of Bell’s; the process sparked in Lawrence a lifelong passion for sitting for portraits, far more than it did Dahoum, who shows his usual self-possession in the finished drawing. They met Janet Laurie, but were not impressed by her slim figure, the Arab taste being for plumpness in women.

No doubt one reason for bringing Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi home with him was that Lawrence wanted to make it clear to his mother and father that his future lay in Syria, not in England. The two men not only were his friends, but deeply respected Lawrence. More than that, he had assumed at Carchemish the role of a hakim, a man of wisdom—different from a sheikh, who is the practical day-to-day leader of a tribe or clan; or a mullah, who is a religious leader and Muslim clergyman. Hakim is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah in the Koran; and a hakim is one who settles disputes and the finer points of law and custom, and whose objective judgment can be relied on by all around him. In short, in the area around Jerablus Lawrence had become famous and admired, despite the fact that he was a foreigner and a Christian. He had all the attributes of a desert hero: he was immensely strong, despite his small size—he described himself as “a pocket Hercules"—an outstanding shot, physically tireless, generous, absolutely fearless, and yet gentle in manner. His self-imposed Spartan regimen gave him yet another bond with the Arabs, who made do with a little flour and a few dates out of necessity. Unlike most Englishmen, Lawrence could survive on their meager diet and walk barefoot where they did. And he could get them to work together without threats or the use of force, in contrast to the German officials, who, to Lawrence’s rage, made full use of the whip, indeed considered it indispensable.

For the same reason that he brought his two friends home to Oxford—he would have added Miss Holmes, from the American mission, whose presence would have been reassuring to Sarah, had he been able to—he urged one of his brothers to come out and visit him; he suggested it in turn to Will, Frank, and Arnold. He was proud of the position he hadachieved among people so very different from himself, and wanted his family to see it. His mother suspected that he had lost his religious faith, and this was true. Lawrence, once he left the family home and the daily Bible readings, never showed any further sign of interest in Christianity, or any other religion; it was a struggle his mother had lost by default, but being who she was she would never give up on saving her second son’s soul as long as he lived. Her eldest son, Bob, would eventually become her partner in faith, a missionary doctor; her younger sons would at least pay lip service to their mother’s intense Christianity for as long she lived; but her beloved Ned had managed to slip from her grasp in the one area that most concerned her. He had also succeeded in that most difficult of tasks for every young person—making a contented life for himself on his own terms, not those of his parents.

By the end of August, Lawrence and his two friends were back at Carchemish. Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi were transformed overnight into celebrities by their voyage to England, but Lawrence was disappointed to find that in his absence the local villagers had been digging up fourteenth-century Arab graves in search of gold, and carelessly destroying much valuable glassware and pottery.

In September, Lawrence’s brother Will arrived, on his way to India, where he was taking up a teaching post, and Lawrence had, at last, an opportunity of showing a member of his family the immense scale of the work he was doing, and his position as a local celebrity. Fortunately, Will’s letters are as long and as full of detail as Lawrence’s—all five of the Lawrence brothers were prodigious letter writers. Will was enchanted by Beirut and, like most visitors, thought Damascus “the most beautiful town” he’d ever seen. Also like most European visitors, he was overwhelmed by the abundance of fruit and flowers—"peaches and nectarines and apples and grapes … sunflowers and roses"—and the friendliness of the people. On September 16 he reached Aleppo, where Lawrence and Dahoum met him. “Ned is known by everyone,” Will noted, “and their enthusiasm over him is quite amusing.” Lawrence took the opportunityof introducing his brother to “Buswari of the Milli Kurds, here, a marvelously-dressed and dignified person who’s invited me to go over to his tribe and see some horse-racing and dancing.” By September 17 Will was at Carchemish, overwhelmed by the number of Lawrence’s friends—Armenian, Christian, and Kurd—and by the ubiquity of his fame. Buswari, of course, was one of the two Kurdish leaders who had settled their blood feud in the expedition house, and one of the grandest and most important figures in the area around Aleppo.

Will’s stay at Carchemish was slightly blighted by the fact that Lawrence was down with a fever—presumably a recurrence of malaria—but he described the mound and the expedition house in tones of awe, and was amazed by the number of people who came to visit Lawrence: “a lieutenant Young, making his way out to India via Baghdad, an American missionary Dr. Usher, going back to Lake Van, and the people from Aleppo the Altounyans.” The Altounyans were an enormously wealthy Armenian family: the father a doctor with his own hospital (staffed by English nurses) in Aleppo; the son a graduate of Rugby School and Cambridge; and the daughter, Norah, “very English.” Young was, among other things, a crack shot, and spoke fluent Arabic and Farsi. Lawrence’s abode near the site of the ancient Hittite city was more like a court than a scholar’s residence—people called on him constantly, and indeed it had become necessary to expand the expedition house to twenty-two rooms. Although Lawrence continued his deliberately meager diet, guests were served omelets for breakfast, and lunches and dinners with many courses.

Since Lawrence wasn’t up to a visit to Buswari Agha’s tented encampment, Young and Will went off together—Buswari had sent his son with splendid horses and an escort of armed retainers for the six-hour ride. They were treated to a lavish dinner of highly spiced minces (which gave Will stomach troubles that plagued him all the way to India) in a carpeted tent so big that half of it could hold more than 100 men for dinner (the other half was curtained off as the harem). They were entertained by music and men dancing, and slept in the position of honor, next to the haremcurtain. The next day they watched a colorful and savage version of polo, which sounds very much like buzkashi in Afghanistan and is played with a slaughtered sheep’s carcass instead of a ball. This was followed by another highly spiced feast. Will was able to report to his parents: “You must not think of Ned as leading an uncivilized existence. When I saw him last as the train left the station he was wearing white flannels, socks and red slippers, with a white Magdalen blazer, and was talking to the governor of Biridjik in a lordly fashion.”

“A lordly fashion.” This is an interesting choice of words on Will’s part, for it is exactly the life that Lawrence reproached his father for having abandoned. He lived in Carchemish as he imagined his father must have lived in Ireland—as a grand squire, an important person in the county, a gentleman. At the time Will was in Carchemish, their father was, by coincidence, on one of his secretive trips to Ireland, where he had, though Will did not of course know it, a wife and four daughters. From time to time, the subject of Thomas Lawrence’s trips to Ireland comes up in Lawrence’s letters home, as when he reacts to a remark in a letter from Will that their father “was still in Ireland,” to which Lawrence comments, “Why go to such a place?” If we are to believe Lawrence, he had already learned at the age of nine or ten why his father was obliged to visit Ireland from time to time, and if so this seemingly innocent question may be a way of annoying his mother from a distance.

Unknowingly, Will had stumbled on the exact point that kept Lawrence in Carchemish, that put him at odds with his parents, and that separated him from his brothers. It is a pity Lawrence never knew that Will had described his way of life as “lordly,” since this would no doubt have given him a certain sardonic pleasure, but they would never see each other again.

Throughout the autumn the dig at Carchemish proceeded at a rapid pace; more and more decorated wall slabs, monuments, basalt doorways, and sculptures were being unearthed, enough to make it clear that Lawrence and Woolley were uncovering one of the most important archaeologicalsites in the Middle East. As winter comes, Lawrence reports that they have purchased five tons of firewood (“olive tree boles … which burn most gloriously”), and that he has been presented with a young leopard, which serves in the role of watchdog. The expedition house had been enlarged, and it is pleasant to imagine how luxurious it must have seemed, with the olive wood blazing in the burnished copper fireplace, the Roman mosaic on the floor, the innumerable precious rugs (Lawrence’s Armenian friend from Aleppo, Dr. Altounyan, was a renowned collector and connoisseur of Oriental rugs), and the leopard stretched out in front of the fire as the two Englishmen ate their dinner, or sat in their easy chairs and read. Lawrence had busied himself, with the help of the multitalented and ubiquitous Lieutenant Young, in carving gargoyles out of soft sandstone to decorate the building. One of these, modeled after Dahoum, had caused considerable fuss among the Arabs,* since, like Orthodox Jews, they were forbidden to make or keep “graven images,” let alone sit for any. In fact the drawing that Dodd had made of Dahoum in Oxford, which was hung in the house, caused trouble enough among Muslims who saw it, though one visitor to the house expressed unusual tolerance by remarking, “God is merciful, and will forgive the maker of it.”

It was an idyllic life—when he was not piecing together stone fragments, or collecting rugs to decorate the house or send home, Lawrence went hawking with the magnificent Buswari Agha at his desert camp, and astonished the Kurds by shattering four glass bottles with four shots at sixty yards. Unsurprisingly, the leopard was proving to be more of a nuisance than Lawrence had anticipated, and the piecing together of Hittite statuary from hundreds of fragments, ranging from several tons to pieces the size of a penny, was exhausting and time-consuming. That Lawrence intended to stay at Carchemish for as long as was necessary isindicated by the fact that he at last took the step of writing to tell his friend Vyvyan Richards that he could not join the printing enterprise. “I cannot print with you when you want me,” he wrote. “I have felt it coming for a long time, and I funked it.”

By mid-December, however, a new and more exciting job had turned up—one that Lawrence, with his thirst for adventure, could hardly resist. The project had powerful sponsors, including Field Marshal the Earl of Kitchener himself, and was one for which Lawrence was unusually well suited. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, the British Palestine Exploration Fund had carried out a meticulous, one-inch-to-the-mile map survey of western Palestine, which ended on a line drawn “from west to east, through Gaza and Beersheba, to Masada on the Western Shore of the Dead Sea.” Kitchener himself had at one point led this survey, drawing up the first modern map of the Holy Land and even establishing the borders of future states such as Lebanon and Syria. The work, which was ultimately published in eight volumes, had intense military as well as biblical importance. In 1913, as the Germans intensified their diplomatic effort to bind Turkey to what would soon become known as the Central Powers (i.e., Germany and Austro-Hungary) in the event of war; and as the Turkish leaders hemmed and hawed and upped their price, attempting to negotiate simultaneously with both sides, Kitchener, now the British agent and consul general (the equivalent of a viceroy) in Egypt, felt an urgent concern to have the survey completed, especially in the Sinai peninsula, from Beersheba to Aqaba, since in the event of war with the Ottoman Empire the Turkish army would certainly attempt to cross this area and seize or block the Suez Canal.

In order to secure the permission of the Turks for the British to carry out this ambitious survey on their soil, it was thought advisable to stress its biblical significance; thus the work would be done under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and so far as possible the presence of serving British officers of the Royal Engineers would be balanced out by the presence of scholarly archaeologists. Mapping the Sinai, for example, might be accomplished on the pretense that the archaeologists wereseeking to find the exact path that Moses and the Jews took on their forty-year journey from Egypt to Canaan.

All attempts to map uncharted areas of the world have multiple purposes. The Palestine Exploration Fund was not in any way a mere fig leaf for the British army or the government of Egypt. There was genuine scholarly interest in extending the survey of the Holy Land beyond the Gaza-Beersheba line to the south and east; and had a Sinai expedition in fact turned up archaeological finds indicating the presence and the exact route of the Jews, it would have been a historical and religious discovery of major importance, not just to Christians, but to Jews and Muslims as well. The Turkish government was neither naive nor entirely convinced by all this biblical packaging; but then again, not all the members of the Turkish government were eager to conclude an alliance with Germany, and even those who were so inclined felt a need to keep the goodwill of the British government for as long as possible—certainly for long enough to attempt to extract the best terms from one side or another in the event of war. Under the circumstances, permission to map the Sinai seemed like a small but friendly concession to a major power, and Turkish permission was forthcoming.*

At home, the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Palestine Exploration Fund moved with astonishing speed, ignoring regular channels and using instead the “old boy” network, always the most efficient way of getting anything done in Britain. Colonel Hedley, the head of the Geographical Section of the War Office (in charge of all mapmaking for the army), had, by one of those convenient coincidences, just been elected to the Executive Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund; he was therefore able to explain the objective of the expedition to the other members within five days of the Turks’ communicating their agreement to it to the British ambassador in Constantinople. It almost goes withoutsaying that Hogarth was also a member of the Palestine Exploration Fund committee and recommended that one of them “approach Kenyon” of the British Museum. Kenyon replied almost immediately: “Hogarth concurs in the idea of lending our men from Jerablus to the P. E. F. [Palestine Exploration Fund] survey … and suggests that, as time is short, both should go. Their names are C. L. Woolley and T. E. Lawrence. The former is the senior man, with rather wider experience; the latter is better at colloquial Arabic, and gets on very well with natives. He has, I think, more of the instincts of an explorer, but is very shy…. Hogarth can tell you more about them, if you wish.” Once again, Hogarth, who seems always to have been in the right place at the right time, had pushed forward the name of his protйgй, and moved Lawrence from the land of lotos eating into that of exploration and high strategy.

From 1875, when Disraeli, with the help of the Rothschilds, purchased Khedive Ismail Pasha’s shares in the Suez Canal Corporation for Ј4 million, to 1956, when Britain and France went to war with Egypt over Nasser’s nationalization of the canal, the protection of the canal had always been regarded as one of the most vital of British interests. The canal was the priceless link between Britain and its vast colonial possessions and dominions in the East. The fear that in the event of war the Turks might attack the canal as a surrogate for the Germans was one of the main reasons for British control of Egypt and the Sudan. Mention of any threat to the canal or any improvement to its defenses therefore invariably produced an instant response, so it is hardly surprising that despite the relatively slow communications of the period, the holiday season, and the normal languor of government and private committees, Woolley and Lawrence (accompanied by Dahoum) arrived in Beersheba on January 9, 1914, after having spent Christmas in Carchemish, and got to work immediately.

From Beersheba south and east there were no roads or railway. Quite apart from the difficulties of the terrain, which were considerable, the Turks wanted nothing that might encourage the British to advance north from Egypt in the event of war, and the British would have regarded any attempt to build roads or a railway as a threat to the canal. “The place isan absolute wilderness,” Lawrence wrote home about the Sinai. “Not even any Arab tribes there: empty, they say.” Gaza was, in those days, “a picturesque little crusading town of about 20,000 people: a fine xiith Cent. Church.” Nothing appeared to have been prepared for them, although a telegram informed them that Captain (later Colonel) S. F. Newcombe of the Royal Engineers was on his way with a caravan of camels. Woolley and Lawrence bought themselves tents, “camp outfit, hired servants, etc. (all on credit, since the P.E.F. had sent our money to Jerusalem),” and made their way to Beersheba with their gear on a donkey, to wait for Newcombe. Lawrence noted that already, “the Turkish Gov. is exceedingly shy of us, and is doing its best to throw all possible difficulties in our way"; this problem would grow worse throughout the expedition. Whatever had been decided about the map survey in Constantinople, here, only a few miles from the Egyptian border, the police recognized a foreign, Christian intrusion when they saw one, and acted accordingly.

Fortunately, Lawrence and Newcombe liked each other at once, and their friendship would last throughout the war years and beyond. Lawrence’s attitude toward professional soldiers was, and would remain, ambivalent. From an early age he felt he had mastered the art of war—very few professional soldiers had anything like his broad knowledge of military history and literature, his ability to inspire others, his endurance, or his sense of terrain and topography. Whatever Lawrence’s preference for the methods of Marshal de Saxe over those of Napoleon, he would not have disagreed with the latter’s comment, “In war, as in prostitution, the amateur is often better than the professional.” As time would show, Lawrence was something of a self-taught genius in tactics and strategy, and he already knew it; this knowledge must have made it all the more difficult for him to accept that he could never have been a regular officer in the post-Edwardian British army. Oxford might be willing to blur or ignore the family background of its scholars, but at Sandhurst, the social conventions were more rigorously enforced, and by people who could read Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage. Illegitimacy was not necessarily a bar to a commission in the British regular army—the future General Sir Adrian Cartonde Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, brilliantly caricatured by Evelyn Waugh as Brigadier Ritchie-Hook in Officers and Gentlemen, was widely believed to be illegitimate, though on the other hand it was also rumored that his father was the king of the Belgians, so Carton de Wiart was a very different proposition from one of the five illegitimate sons of an Anglo-Irish landowner. Even leaving to one side Lawrence’s height, as somebody who was born out of wedlock to a servant he would very likely not have been accepted into Sandhurst as a cadet, or into most of the regiments of the British army as an officer. It never ceased to gall him that men with nothing like his talent or knowledge became regular officers and rose to high rank. This is not to say that Lawrence had ever wanted to go to Sandhurst; he simply did not want to be patronized by those who had gone there. With regulars whom he didn’t like, or whose hostility he rightly or wrongly suspected, no matter how high their rank, he often adopted an attitude of know-it-all superiority and impertinence bordering on insubordination. On the other hand, with those who knew their business and recognized that he knew his, he often formed close and long-lasting friendships, despite great differences of rank. These men included such very dissimilar military figures as Young, Newcombe, Wingate, Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, the future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Allenby, and of course Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Trenchard.* Throughout most of his life, Lawrence remained a military man manquй—the runaway boy soldier would become a decorated lieutenant colonel, and in the end, an aircraftman first class (the equivalent of a private), sitting on his bunk in a barracks, writing ambitious (and sensible) schemes for the improvement of the Royal Air Force to his old friend, the chief of the Air Staff.

Newcombe turned up in Beersheba to greet Woolley and Lawrence with a caravan of a dozen camels. He had supposed that Woolley and

Lawrence would have a heavy load of equipment, and was surprised to find that they could carry everything they needed on a donkey. He seems to have been expecting a pair of scientific graybeards from the British Museum, and so may have been equally surprised to meet two healthy young men, fit and armed. Newcombe had five surveying teams at work, and collated their findings himself every night. Lawrence, who already supposed himself to be an expert on the subject, would learn a lot about practical mapmaking from Newcombe in the six weeks of the expedition. From the very beginning the archaeological results were disappointing. However long the Jews had wandered in the Sinai, they had been a nomad people, and left no more trace of themselves behind than the modern Bedouin did. Even places that were mentioned as important in Exodus proved to have no ruins older than the Byzantine or Roman period. When they got to Kadesh (from which Moses had sent envoys to the king of Edom asking for passage for his people, and where Miriam is buried), Lawrence wrote, typically, “[It] is a filthy dirty little water hole, and we more than sympathize with the disgust of the Children of Israel when they got here.” Isaac’s well at Rehoboth, although nearly 300 feet deep, showed no signs of ancient origin; and Zephath, one of the cities of the Canaanites attacked by Joshua, was unfindable. Everywhere Lawrence looked, the land was wasted and abandoned, although he believed, correctly, that if some of it was plowed and irrigated it could be rendered as fruitful as it had been in Roman times. Even the normally ebullient Woolley was pessimistic about finding any trace of biblical cities, let alone of Moses’s route from Egypt. The complete absence of any local food crops made them dependent on what little they carried with them, plus an occasional pigeon that they managed to shoot. At one point they failed to make contact with their baggage caravan and wandered through the desert in search of their tent camp, while the Turkish police, alerted to their disappearance, searched ineffectually for them. Eventually, Woolley and Lawrence split up, Lawrence and Dahoum accompanying Newcombe to the southeast across the Sinai toward Aqaba, over what even Lawrence describes as very “rugged” country.

At Aqaba, the Turks lost patience with what had been described to them as a biblical expedition; or perhaps it simply became clear to the men on the spot that Lawrence and Woolley were merely the window dressing for a team of British military topographers. Newcombe was not dismayed—Aqaba had already been surveyed—but Lawrence was annoyed, and decided to tweak the noses of the kaimakam and his policemen. For his own amusement he had wanted to visit the ruins of a crusader fort on the island of Geziret Faraun, a few hundred yards from the shore at Aqaba. When the kaimakam refused to allow this, Lawrence constructed a crude raft out of old gasoline cans, and he and Dahoum paddled it out to the island, despite the presence of large sharks, for which the Red Sea is well known. As a result, he and Dahoum were marched out of town under escort. They eventually managed to shake off the escort in the steep, rocky defiles that rose behind Aqaba—very close to the route down which Lawrence would lead the Howeitat in 1917. Skeptics who attribute the capture of Aqaba to the plans or local knowledge of Auda Abu Tayi or Sharif Nasir almost always overlook the fact that the countryside around Aqaba and the approaches to it from inland were familiar to Lawrence because he had been there only three years before, and on foot, and had later mapped it from an aerial survey. Aqaba’s defenses and its weaknesses were well known to him and, with his almost photographic memory for topography, familiar. It was, as he described it, “a country of awful crags and valleys, impassible for camels, and very difficult on foot,” and the Turkish policemen assigned to escort him were still wandering back into Aqaba exhausted days after Lawrence and Dahoum had left them behind.

The two made their way from Aqaba to the Hejaz railway, then “back to Mount Hor,” where Lawrence visited Aaron’s grave. From there they went to Petra, which impressed him as much as it still impresses the modern tourist, and where he found, encamped in the desert, two well-dressed “English ladies” typical of the intrepid British tourists of the period, who never hesitated to plunge off the beaten track. One of them was Lady Legge, and the other Lady Evelyn Cobbold—a forceful former Mayfair beauty who was a daughter of the earl of Leicester, and an accomplished gardener, fisherwoman, and deerstalker, and who, after converting to Islam, would become the first Englishwoman to enter Mecca. Lawrence was able to borrow money from Lady Evelyn Cobbold to continue his journey. More important, on the way out of Aqaba Lawrence located the crossroads where lay the two great paths through the desert that had served the Jews in their flight from Egypt; these paths were still in use by Bedouin raiding parties. This knowledge would be of enormous value to him in 1917, as he and Auda Abu Tayi approached Aqaba across the desert.