Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (35 page)

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.

Thanks to Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Lawrence made his way from Petra to Maan, waiting there for the train to arrive from Medina; and from there to Damascus, and back to Carchemish via Aleppo. At Maan, the Turks had threatened to arrest him, but he managed to disarm the police patrol and march them off, with their rifles under his arm, to their headquarters, where he staged a scene worthy of Woolley, extracting an apology from the chief of police. “A huge jest,” he called it, but then Lawrence’s sense of humor was different from that of most people. Even when he was on “the beaten track,” as opposed to the desert, each of his journeys was an adventure; and not surprisingly, the Turkish authorities seldom knew how to deal with a determined, well-armed, indignant Englishman, dressed in Arab clothing, speaking Arabic, and apparently enjoying the official protection of both the British government and the Palestine Exploration Fund.

By the beginning of March Lawrence was back in Carchemish, much pleased to hear that Hogarth had raised enough money for a new season of digging—in fact, he had secured enough money from a donor to cover five more years—but irritated that permission had not yet been obtained from the Turkish government to renew the work. In the meantime, Lawrence continued to send home what seems, from reading his letters, a never-ending shipment of carpets. Possibly influenced by his Armenian friends the Altounyans, Lawrence had become something of a connoisseur of Oriental carpets, and bought them everywhere he went—by thistime, 2 Polstead Road can hardly have had a single room without one or more carpets shipped home by Lawrence.

On March 21, Woolley and Lawrence resumed the dig at last—they had been busy brokering a peace between the German railway engineers and Buswari Agha, after their Kurdish workers went out on strike. As usual, the dispute had turned violent, and it even reached the pages of the London Times, under the headline “Riot on the Bagdad Railway,” not unnaturally alarming Lawrence’s family. A Circassian working for the Germans had shot a Kurd during the protest over wages; this led to a shoot-out between the German railway engineers and the Kurds, in which eight men were wounded, including a British subject and an Australian. Woolley and Lawrence intervened, negotiated a settlement (or “blood payment”) of £70 for the family of the dead Kurd, and received the thanks of the Turkish government. (The British consul in Aleppo suggested that Woolley and Lawrence should receive decorations for their courage, and these were apparently offered but refused.) Lawrence dismissed the whole affair as “a mere trifle,” which was no doubt what he wanted his mother to believe.

Hogarth, who arrived shortly after the shoot-out, praised Lawrence for his behavior “at much risk,” and promised to reassure Sarah when he got home. He stayed three weeks, and was much impressed by the progress that was being made at Carchemish, in part due to Lawrence’s vigorous dynamiting. In May, Stewart Newcombe arrived—Woolley had suggested to him that he should take an interest in archaeology, and that a trip to Carchemish to look at the railway line the Germans were building might be worthwhile. Newcombe had mentioned this suggestion to Lord Kitchener, who was all in favor of it. Newcombe and another British officer took a somewhat perfunctory look at the Hittite artifacts, then set off to the west to follow the railway route to the difficult country in the Taurus Mountains. They were unable to obtain much information, however, perhaps because they were only too clearly British officers, so Newcombe asked Woolley and Lawrence, who were planning to go home in June, to follow the same route on their way back to England. Lawrence planned toreturn to Carchemish in August 1914, but he was happy to spend a couple of weeks sightseeing in Anatolia with Woolley. They managed to get farther into the Taurus Mountains than Newcombe, perhaps because they were only too clearly a pair of archaeologists. They were certainly able to confirm that the railway tunneling in the mountainous areas was considerably behind schedule and that goods and passengers bound from Haidar Pasha, opposite Constantinople, to Baghdad would have to get off at Muslimie Junction, just north of Aleppo, and at Bozanti Khan, northwest of Adana, since the tunnels in both places were incomplete; thus there would be additional days of travel time and endless difficulties for troops, guns, and supplies being shipped to Iraq. Lawrence explained the two-week delay in his arrival home by telling his family that he was going down the Euphrates River with an army friend to see Baghdad, though in fact he would be traveling in the opposite direction overland with Woolley. No doubt it would have been difficult to explain why he was going on a long tour of the Taurus Mountains on the way home to England rather than simply taking the train to Beirut. Woolley would later explain, with what sounds like a certain degree of indignation, that it was “the only piece of spying that I ever did before the war,” but it is difficult to see the survey of the Sinai as anything but a milder form of espionage.

By the first week of July Lawrence was at home in Oxford again, working with Woolley on the book that was intended to prove the survey of the Sinai had been on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
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This turned out to be a bigger task than either of them had anticipated, in part because they had so little to show for their travels, and in part because Woolley’s and Lawrence’s styles of writing were very different, and neither was a natural collaborator. Furthermore, Lawrence’s notes did not take into account the work of numerous previous travelers in the Sinai, so he was obliged to spend a good deal of time gathering material in the Oxford libraries, perhaps no longer an easy task for a man who was now used to being out in the open all day with a gang of laborers. For whatever reason, the work went slowly, and the only hint we have of any relief from it is that Lawrence had dinner at Hogarth’s home with that intrepid traveler Gertrude Bell, and they exchanged many hair-raising tales about life in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. More interesting still was the amount of information she had gathered about the tribes who lived in the desert on either side of the Hejaz railway, including the Howeitat.

There is no evidence, despite their political sophistication, that they dwelled on the news that the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife had been assassinated by Serb nationalists at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

On July 28 an even more sinister event took place. Unsatisfied by the Serbians’ reply to its ultimatum, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; and in response, Serbia’s patron, Russia, began the slow (by reason of its immense size and primitive road and rail system) process of mobilizing its army, the largest in the world. Alarmed, Germany declared war on Russia on August 2. On August 3, France, obliged by treaty to mobilize its army in support of Russia, found itself at war with Germany; and in accordance with the long-standing plans of the German high command, the German army invaded neutral Belgium so as to reach Paris by the shortest possible route. Standing in his office as the long summer day drew to a close, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. I fear we will not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The next day, August 4, obligated by a seventy-five-year-old treaty to defend Belgium’s neutrality, a horrified and divided Liberal government declared war on Germany.

It only remained to be seen whether Turkey would still be neutral—and, if not, which side it would join.

Lawrence had planned to be back in Carchemish in August, and to work there for the next four or five seasons.

He would never return.

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The equivalent of les mandarins in France–that is to say, men (and nowadays women) who move at equal ease in the worlds of academia, government, big business, finance, and the arts as a kind of invisible permanent ruling class.

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As a result, no fewer than three oxford colleges have a claim on Lawrence: Jesus, where he spent his three undergraduate years; Magdalen, because of his four-year demyship; and All Souls, where he was made a fellow after the Paris Peace Conference. During his four years as an archaeologist in the Middle east he often wore the white blazer of the Magdalen College Boat Club, to which, as somebody who never rowed, he was not strictly speaking entitled.

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how good Lawrence’s Arabic became is still a matter of dispute among his biographers. he himself did not make exaggerated claims for it. he was eventually able to speak it reasonably well (though he was weak on grammar), and to recognize the major regional differences of speech, but he did not claim to be able to pass as an Arab.

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A “squeeze” was then the accepted method for recording an inscription on stone. A sheet of paper of medium weight, not unlike blotting paper or papier-mâché, was soaked, applied to the stone, and forced into the crevices and markings with a brush and allowed to dry, then removed very carefully.