Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

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.”

Perhaps inevitably, Hogarth has been treated as a kind of Edwardianequivalent of John Le Carrй's spymaster George Smiley by some of Lawrence’s biographers, as if he had recruited his young protйgй for Britain’s secret service while Ned was still bicycling in a schoolboy’s shorts over to the Ashmolean with his finds, but this is to overemphasize that side of Hogarth’s life, as well as to underestimate Lawrence’s lifelong aversion to moving to anybody’s pace or orders but his own. Still, Hogarth was certainly one of that informal circle of learned and adventurous men and women who passed information on to the government, in his case about the Balkans and the Near East, though he was not by any stretch of the imagination a spymaster who recruited and trained undergraduates. In the days before World War I, professional spies were employed by the continental powers against one another, but the British, particularly in the far reaches of the empire, relied on an informal and above all amateur web of explorers, archaeologists, adventurous businessmen, and travel writers for information. Given the secretive nature of the Ottoman Empire and its increasingly feeble hold over large areas of its territory, British explorers, adventurers, archaeologists, students of religion, and Arabists proliferated in the great empty spaces of Syria and Arabia, to the alarm of the French, who themselves had designs on Lebanon and Syria; and it would have been unlikely for some of these people not to have gathered such information as they could for friends in the government and the diplomatic service, without feeling that they were, in any organized way, “spying.”

Certainly Hogarth encouraged the young Lawrence to combine his interest in the Middle East with his passion for archaeology; and Hogarth may also have been sensitive enough to guess that Lawrence would benefit from a long period away from home and away from the pressures placed on him there by his mother. Not that Lawrence would necessarily have confided all this to Hogarth, however sympathetic a listener he was, but there was no need for him to; Hogarth, Lawrence would later write, was “the only man I had never to let into my confidence—he would get there naturally.”

While Lawrence was finishing his research in Rouen, Hogarth had just returned from Turkey, where he had been discussing with the Ottoman authorities British interest in the ruins of the ancient Hittite city of Carchemish, then a mound of rubble covered by sand, dirt, and the debris of later cities overlooking the Euphrates near Jerablus. The Hittites—unlike the ancient Egyptians—were an archaeological problem of great importance to scholars because there were few excavated Hittite sites and their language remained undeciphered. The Hittites had lived in a broad, crescent-shaped area of Anatolia and northern Syria, stretching as far to the south along the Mediterranean as modern Lebanon and as far to the east as the border of modern Iraq. The history of their kingdom began about 1750 BCE and came to an end about 1160 BCE, when internal strife, and warfare with the Egyptians to the south and the Assyrians to the east, brought about the collapse of what had once been a great empire. The British had a great interest in the Hittites, in part because dazzling new discoveries of whole cities seemed likely to be made in the area (in contrast to what was now the patient, painstaking excavation of Egyptian tombs), and in part because here, as elsewhere, rivalry between Britain and Germany played a major role. Hugo Winckler’s discoveries at Bogazkцy in Anatolia in 1906–1907 had put the “Hittite problem” on the map—until then there was some doubt that the Hittites had ever existed—and it now became an urgent matter of academic prestige for the archaeology department of Oxford and the British Museum in London not to lag behind the University of Berlin. The British had known about the mound at Jerablus since the eighteenth century, and had made several attempts to dig there, revealing the presence of immense ancient ruins buried under the shattered remains of a Greek and a later Roman city. But these excavations were being made in what one archaeologist described as “a dreary and desolate waste” in the Syrian desert north of Aleppo, and between that desolation and the difficulties raised by the hostile local inhabitants and the Turkish authorities, work did not progress swiftly. Now, doubts in the British archaeological world that the Hittites had existed gave way to the conviction that the mound at Jerablus was of greater importance than the one Winckler was working on at Bogazkцy, and must be excavated systematically as soon as possible. Hogarth, with his knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, and the area, was naturally an enthusiast for a project that combined patriotism and scientific knowledge. He had already visited the site in 1908, and pronounced favorably on it to the British Museum, which had applied for permission to dig there to the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Constantinople; authorities there let the matter rest for two years, owing to civil unrest, rebellion, and the overthrow of the sultan.

In 1910, after Turkey had settled down in the firmer hands of the “Young Turks,” the British ambassador in Constantinople was asked to raise the matter again, and this time, permission was granted. Hogarth’s choice of Lawrence was a natural one. Lawrence had clearly demonstrated a flair for digging up relics of the past, as well as for bargaining for them; he had bought a number of Hittite seals for Hogarth during his walking tour of the Holy Land; he was physically tough and fearless; he had a smattering of Arabic; he was a keen amateur photographer; and he had actually come very close to Carchemish while he was in Syria. Lawrence himself, when he heard about Hogarth’s trip to Constantinople in 1910, had asked his old friend E. T. Leeds, at the Ashmolean, if there was any chance of his being included in the party going to Jerablus with Hogarth.

This raised any number of difficulties, since Lawrence was receiving a scholarship from Jesus College to support his research on medieval pottery for a BLitt degree, which, on the face of things, seemed incompatible with excavating a Hittite site in Syria. But despite Leeds’s doubts, Lawrence demonstrated his lifelong ability to get his own way. Hogarth agreed to take Lawrence, and then, with superb diplomatic skill, managed to secure for his young protйgй a “senior demyship,” a kind of research fellowship, at his own college, Magdalen,* which meant that the British Museum would not have to pay anything but Lawrence’s living expenses at thesite. This was not an inconsiderable feat—Lawrence’s demyship would bring him Ј100 a year for four years (about the equivalent of $12,500 a year today).

With equal skill Jesus College was placated by the suggestion that Lawrence would not only continue his research on medieval pottery but extend his survey of crusader castles in Syria, enabling him to expand his BA thesis into a book; and the British Museum was informed (a little optimistically) that his services were necessary to the expedition because of his command of Arabic, his familiarity with the area, and his knowledge about pottery. All this was the academic equivalent of a carom shot at billiards, and speaks volumes about Hogarth’s talent for manipulation, and Lawrence’s ability to claim convincingly many different skills at the same time. If Lawrence’s parents had any doubts, Hogarth no doubt dealt with those as well—he seems to have gotten along well with both of them—and moved swiftly to send Lawrence to Syria to improve his Arabic, for which so much had been claimed.

Lawrence sailed for Beirut at the beginning of December 1910, hardly more than two months after Hogarth’s return from Constantinople, leaving in his father’s hands the problem of the printing press that Vyvyan Richards and Lawrence were to have founded together. On the way to Beirut, Lawrence managed to visit Athens and Constantinople for the first time. Like many visitors to Greece, he was puzzled by how little the modern Greeks resembled the ancient ones, and compared the former unfavorably with the latter. The voyage, Lawrence complained, was very slow, and the meals were huge and endless (it was a French ship, of the Messageries Maritimes).

By December 10, he was able to write home from Constantinople, where he had an unexpectedly long stay when the engines of his ship broke down, leaving him free to do rather more sightseeing than he had expected. He reported home cheerfully that “the cholera has ceased to all practical purposes,” and he was probably the only tourist in the city’s long history to have found Constantinople “very clean.” He praised the “disorder” of the city, the noisy and colorful variety of its open-airmarkets, and the fact that there were hardly more than “twenty yards of straight street” in all of Stamboul. He attempted to interest three Canadian priests whom he had befriended in the pleasures of sightseeing in Constantinople, but they found everything very dirty, prompting Lawrence to express the broad-minded point of view that would enable him to lead the Bedouin in warfare: “They were always talking of quel salйtй, of the dirt & disorder of things, of the lack of shops and carriages and what they were pleased to call conveniences (which are more trouble than they are worth). They seemed too narrow to get outside their civilization, or state of living…. Is civilization the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage from ourselves?” This was a question that Lawrence was to answer for himself, over the next few years, with his attempt to live like a Bedouin and even to exceed the capacity of the Bedouin for living on the borderline of human existence.

Lawrence arrived in Beirut shortly before Christmas—it had taken him the best part of a month to travel from Britain to Lebanon—and moved immediately to Jebail, the ancient Greek city of Byblos, where he was to attend the mission school and “perfect” his Arabic.* His teacher, Fareedeh el Akle, who was still alive in 1976, was more realistic about her pupil’s knowledge of the language than Hogarth had been. She praised his exceptional intelligence, and his determination to master the language, but pointed out that “in a short time he could speak and write a little,” which is significantly less than the command of Arabic that Hogarth had attributed to him. It is curious that this supposedly “crash course” consisted of only “one hour [a day] on a red sofa in the large hall,” though Lawrence surely also did a lot of reading and practiced his Arabic on the streets of Jebail. Fareedeh el Akle not only admired her young pupil, but appreciated his keen interest in the Arabian people, and “the spiritualside of his character.” Once, when she was talking to Lawrence about some matter of spiritual significance, he replied, “Help comes from within, not from without,” which might stand as the definition of his peculiar, lonely strength throughout his life. The inner strength of all the Lawrence boys was extraordinary, perhaps the most important quality they inherited from parents who had, by their own action, virtually cut themselves off from the rest of the world without any apparent regret.

Toward the end of her long life, after being questioned by John Mack, a biographer of Lawrence who was also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Fareedeh wrote to a friend, “Lawrence seems to me like an oyster which has, through pain and suffering, all through life developed into a pearl which the world is trying to evaluate, taking it to pieces layer by layer, without realizing the true value of the whole.” There is some truth to this, even today. Lawrence’s detractors and admirers alike tend to dissect his personality into thin slices, separating the soldier from the scholar, the hero from the teller of tall tales, the victim of neuroses from the man of action, and in the process losing sight of just what an attractive and interesting person he was, even at his most infuriating. Fareedeh clearly recognized this, and understood early on that Lawrence was always more than the sum of his parts. Provocative as Lawrence could be, there was about him a certain sweetness of disposition, a spiritual quality, and above all a sense that he was a special person, destined for greatness, even though it was not yet clear what kind it would be.

Lawrence remained at Jebail studying Arabic until mid-February, keeping up a steady flow of correspondence with his family and friends. The entire Lawrence family seems to have been engaged in writing an endless series of letters and postcards, so that Lawrence seems to have known as much about what was going on at 2 Polstead Road as if he had still been living there, and there was hardly a detail of his own life in Jebail on which he did not report home at length. Apparently his parents were in the habit of showing his letters to Hogarth, since Lawrence asks them to stop doing so, perhaps fearing that Hogarth would be bored by the humdrum details of his life at Jebail, and that his correspondencewith Hogarth ought to be kept on a higher level than worries about Thomas Lawrence’s health, or promises of coins and stamps for Arnie’s collection.

A long letter from Vyvyan Richards reminds Lawrence uncomfortably of the promise to go into business with him. Richards, who seems to have been unable to take a hint, was in the process of planning to build “the hut” where they would live together, and Lawrence asks his father to send Richards some money on his behalf, but in rather lukewarm terms, surely aware that his father will be reluctant to do any such thing.

On January 24 he responds to his mother’s copy of a long letter from Richards—Lawrence describes it as “huge"—attempting to deal with the practical problems Richards is raising about the project. Lawrence asks his father to bear in mind that printing, as he and Richards envision it, is “not a business but a craft,” which pretty well sums up Thomas Lawrence’s objection to the scheme, and argues that he and Richards cannot be expected to “sit down to it for so many hours a day, any more than one could paint a picture on that scheme,” although in fact that is exactly what printers and painters do.

By February 18 he was back in Beirut again, to meet Hogarth. Those who think of the Middle East as uninterruptedly hot should bear in mind that Lawrence reported the railway line between Beirut and Aleppo was blocked by “snow 30 feet deep for 7 kilometers,” a factor which would play a part in the later stages of his campaign against the Turks in 1917–918. Hogarth, who had been delayed by bad weather in Constantinople, arrived accompanied by his assistant R. Campbell Thompson, a “cunei-formist” and specialist in Semitic languages, whose presence Lawrence managed mostly to ignore in his letters home; Hogarth’s “archeological overseer” Gregorios Antoniou, a Greek Cypriot who had supervised the excavating on Hogarth’s previous expeditions, joined the party in Beirut. They were stuck there for some days, since snow continued to fall in the mountains while a ferocious storm prevented them from sailing, but they finally managed to get on a vessel bound for Haifa and from there went on by train to Damascus, on one of the railway lines that Lawrencewould later spend much time and effort blowing up. They passed on their way Nazareth, which, Lawrence wrote for his mother’s benefit, was “no uglier than Basingstoke,” and journeyed on to Deraa, the vital railway junction where Lawrence would be taken prisoner, beaten, and suffer his worst and most painful humiliation. They lunched at the station buffet, which “was flagrantly and evidently an exotic” and served French food in an eastern decor. Hogarth dazzled Lawrence by speaking, with equal fluency, “Turkish & Greek, & French, & German, & Italian & English,” and even Lawrence remarked on how weird it was “to be so far out of Europe.” This was no longer the rocky, hilly landscape of the Holy Land, which had once been fertile under Roman rule, and over much of which he had walked on foot. Alongside the railway line lay “the Lejah, the lava no-man’s-land, and the refuge of all the outlaws of the Ottoman Empire … almost impassible, except to a native who knows the ways.” One senses Lawrence’s fascination with that vast, empty space—he had glimpsed from the train the fabled “great Hajj road,” the pilgrim way over which Doughty had approached on camel to the very outskirts of Mecca. That evening they reached Damascus, and from there, via Homs, went to Aleppo.

Lawrence wrote home from Aleppo that he found Thompson “pleasant,” by which he seems to mean that Thompson was no competition for Hogarth’s attention, and drops the news that he may not get back to England “this year,” that is to say for at least another nine months. Hogarth’s preparations for the excavation included, Lawrence notes with approval, nine kinds of jam and three kinds of tea; between the three men they carried the complete works of Shakespeare (Thompson), Dante (Hogarth), and Spenser (Lawrence), as well as large quantities of pistachio nuts and “Turkish delight.” Lawrence was in a part of the world where his taste for sweet things and his dislike of alcohol were shared by most of the local population. Aleppo he found muddy and filthy, though he seems to have enjoyed the souk, since he was always on the hunt for local pottery and brassware that might please his mother. His brother Frank was apparently practicing pistol shooting, and Lawrence advises him to shoot withouttaking aim: “The only practical way is almost to throw your bullet like a stone, at the object.” This is excellent advice for somebody with good eyes and a steady hand, and from one who knows what he is talking about—those who saw Lawrence in action during the war marveled at his marksmanship, including the Bedouin, who set great store by it.

The winter weather was so bad that they did not arrive in Jerablus until March 10, having made the journey from Aleppo by camel and horse (eleven baggage horses, ten camels), except for Lawrence, who walked. The only local industry was the raising of Glycyrizza glabra, a desert plant resembling fennel, from the roots of which licorice is extracted; and the headman of the nearest village was also the agent for the licorice company, who had put the company’s house at the disposal of the British archaeologists. The village consisted of about forty fairly new houses—it was clearly something along the lines of what we would call a “company town"—with a good water supply, about half a mile west of a bend in the great Euphrates River, and about three-quarters of a mile south of the great mound of Carchemish, which loomed over the countryside. To the northwest the snow-covered summits of the Taurus Mountains were clearly visible, and the wind from them reduced the daytime temperature to the low forties. Provision for sleeping in the open on the roof of the one-story house, however, suggested that conditions in the summer might be radically different. (Lawrence included in his letter a helpful sketch plan of the house.)

To say that Lawrence found himself in his element would be putting it mildly. He was far from home, and fully occupied day and night. Indeed, he did not write home for another ten days, being busy with establishing their living quarters. For the moment, Lawrence seems to have been in charge of the food supply (with two servants to prepare it), and was pleased to find excellent goat’s milk and an ample supply of lentils; how pleased Hogarth and Thompson were is unrecorded. Gregorios the Cypriot, Hogarth’s man Friday, had the task of rounding up about 100 men to do the digging, while Thompson surveyed the site, Hogarth wrote up the results for the British Museum, and Lawrence did the drawingand “squeezing” of the inscriptions.* Lawrence was also charged with putting up doors and shelves, the kind of hand work he delighted in, invariably producing something finer than what was expected or required. Indeed his transformation of their living quarters soon became something of an obsession—oddly enough, for a man who would spend many years of his life in the desert or in barracks, he had a passion and a real talent for domestic improvement and decoration. As for the digging, they began in the area where the British had stopped work thirty years ago, and soon uncovered “a great entrance staircase” and a number of large bas-relief slabs. The work was difficult, involving the movement, without machinery, of huge rocks, slag, and shattered stone fragments of a later city, and went slowly. The kaimakam (police chief) of the Biridjik district, prodded by the government in Constantinople, had provided a small, tented garrison of Turkish soldiers to guard the archaeologists from any local hotheads, and Lawrence noted with interest the numerous deficiencies in these soldiers’ equipment and training. At the end of a letter home, he adds briefly that they are expecting a visit from a “Miss G. Bell,” the desert explorer, archaeologist, traveler, and author of Between the Desert and the Sown, then forty-two years old and already a famous and glamorous figure.

In his letters home from Carchemish Lawrence sounds like a man who has at last found his place in the world. Increasingly, he joined Gregorios in directing the men as they labored to move huge stones, some weighing many tons. He “devised a derrick” to help pull upright fallen statuary, repaired equipment, learned how to make his own paint, and wrote home to have another pair of boots made and sent out to him, “with slightly thicker soles” and leather laces, since the rocky terrain was already wearing out his present boots.

Hogarth was preparing to return to England, where he would publish the results to date in the London Times; he was taking Gregorios withhim, effectively leaving Thompson and Lawrence in charge of the site. Since Thompson was basically a language expert, that would put Lawrence in charge of the dig—no small responsibility for a young man of twenty-two. To replace Gregorios as overseer of the workforce, Hogarth selected a local man, Sheikh Hamoudi, surely a good choice, since he was “tall, gaunt … long-armed and immensely powerful,” boasted that he had in his youth “provoked other men to fight for the sheer pleasure of killing them,” and “admitted to six or seven murders.” Hamoudi was to become a great friend and admirer of Lawrence’s, and taught him much that would come in handy later, when Lawrence was dealing with the blood feuds and intertribal violence that were endemic in the Arab army.

Lawrence seems to have devised ways of keeping the workforce happy and active, by encouraging contests of one team against another in raising large stones, rather like a tug-of-war, and by instituting a system of small additional payments for each object found, though no matter how hard they dug, layer after layer of the ruins of the Roman city remained between them and the Hittite city below. Hogarth was disappointed, though realistic—some digs worked out; others didn’t—but Lawrence continued to be almost irrationally happy. Between Thompson and himself, they managed to get rid of an incompetent and intrusive Turkish “commissaire,” whose job it was to ensure that the Turkish Museum got its correct share of the finds; and to Lawrence’s joy they were witnesses to a lively, romantic desert abduction, when a “black-bearded … & picturesque” young man galloped up on a horse, picked up a girl who had been washing at the spring, “set her before him on his horse, and galloped out of the village, offering to shoot anyone that stood in his way.” They were cousins, and her parents had refused to give her to him. Her male relatives immediately mounted and sped after the eloping couple. A few days later there was an unrelated double marriage, in which “the whole people turned out, the men afoot, or on horse in such as had them, the women perched in threes and fours on the humps of camels: everybody in the most brilliant colours, new or clean.”

This was a long way from Oxford, indeed about as far as Lawrencecould get, and far outweighed Thompson’s regret that they had not so far unearthed something like the Rosetta Stone, a stone or seal with writing in Hittite and in Assyrian cuneiform, without which most of what they were unearthing in the way of epigraphical specimens would remain unreadable. In the same letter, on May 16, Lawrence took the trouble of drawing the Carchemish “mound” and the surrounding countryside, in three-dimensional detail. He ends the letter with the reassuring note that the countryside has been peaceful, since “the Kurd chief of Kiranshehir was poisoned … by the Vali [governor] of Aleppo,” a nice comment on ethnic politics in the Ottoman Empire.

On May 23, he reported home on the long-awaited arrival of Gertrude Bell, who at first took a rather high-handed approach to the work of her two young rivals in archaeology, but as the day went on was eventually dazzled and silenced by the sheer breadth of Lawrence’s erudition. He thought her “pleasant,” but “not beautiful (except with a veil on, perhaps).” Already a celebrity, Bell had traveled in the Jebel Druze against the wishes of the Turkish authorities, camped in Petra, and conducted her own expedition across the Syrian desert all the way to Baghdad, boldly pushing deeper into the life of the desert tribes than any European woman had ever gone (though her most daring journeys were still ahead of her). She was bold, fearless, impatient, formidably well educated, a chain-smoker in an age when women did not smoke in public, inured to hardship, and never at a loss when faced with Turkish interference with her plans or Arab hostility toward a foreign woman traveling alone.

Bell was disappointed not to find Hogarth; she had ridden across the desert from Damascus on her mare to see him, accompanied by her servant Fattuh, and dressed in her desert explorer costume: a long, divided khaki skirt and a linen jacket, with an Arab head cloth wrapped around her hat. She was prepared to be skeptical about the excavations carried out so far, but was immediately struck by Lawrence, about whom she wrote in her diary, “an interesting boy, he is going to make a traveler.” Lawrence appears to have dressed for the occasion—for news of Bell’s approach had preceded her—in his Magdalen blazer, white shorts, red Arab slippers with upturned pointed toes, and a crimson woven Arab belt with extra-long tassels hanging over the left hip, which indicated that he was a bachelor.

After lunch, the three of them proceeded to the mound, where Bell observed the men excavating and condemned the methods being used as “prehistoric” (she was notoriously outspoken and critical), compared with those of the Germans. Lawrence maintained that the German methods, while they looked neater, involved a great deal of reconstruction, but eventually they made peace over dinner, and parted friends and mutual admirers when she retired to the tented camp Fattuh had set up for her. They would remain friends until her death, despite many furious arguments. On her departure, at five-thirty in the morning, Bell was dismayed that the villagers gathered to jeer at her—she did not realize that they assumed she had come to Carchemish to marry Lawrence. In order to calm them Lawrence had explained that she was too plain and old for him.

Hogarth was not certain that it was worth continuing the dig at Carchemish for a second season, but, always looking out for Lawrence’s interests, suggested that he might benefit from a season or half a season of “tomb digging” for the great Flinders Petrie, the dean of Egyptian archaeology and the head of the British School of Archaeology in Cairo. This would represent a substantial step up in Lawrence’s professional qualifications as an archaeologist, a career about which Lawrence remained nevertheless unsure—he toyed with the idea of becoming a newspaperman or a novelist, and continued to speculate on how best he might find a local source of fine vellum, to be “stained [purple] with Tyrian die,” for the artistic binding of the books that he and Richards were still planning to print. Meanwhile, Hogarth, never one to delay once a plan had occurred to him, wrote about Lawrence to his colleague Petrie: “Can you make room on your excavations next winter for a young Oxford graduate, T. Lawrence, who has been with me at Carchemish? He is a very unusual type…. If he goes to you he would probably come on foot from north Syria. I may add that he is extremely indifferent to what heeats or how he lives. He knows a good deal of Arabic…. I can assure you that he is really worth while.”

Lawrence did not learn until early in June that the excavation in Carchemish was to go on until August, though perhaps without a second season. By now the level of the Euphrates was falling, exposing sandbanks and islands, and the area was experiencing a plague of locusts, one of which he dried and sent to his youngest brother, Arnie. There was also an invasion of vast numbers of fleas and biting sand flies as the weather warmed. The constant company of Thompson seems to have been getting on his nerves—"any little thing upsets [him],” Lawrence remarked.

Lawrence was making something of a name for himself by producing miracle cures with such things as ammonia and Seidlitz powders, a popular nineteenth-century remedy for stomach distress which fizzed and bubbled furiously when added to water, and which terrified the Arabs, who had never seen such a thing. One of the two “water boys” was persuaded to take half a glass, and this is the first mention in Lawrence’s letters of his name: Dahoum.

Dahoum means “darkness,” and may have been an ironic nickname, in the same spirit that the friends of a very short man might call him “Lofty,” or a very tall man “Tiny,” since Dahoum seems in fact to have had rather light skin for a boy of mixed Hittite and Arab ancestry (his family actually lived on the Carchemish mound). He has been described as “beautifully built and remarkably handsome,” but in photographs taken of him by Lawrence (and in a pencil sketch made of him by Francis Dodd, when Lawrence brought Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi home to Oxford in 1913) he looks not so much beautiful—his face is a little fleshy for that, very much like the faces on the Hittite bas-reliefs that Lawrence was uncovering—as good-humored, intelligent, and amazingly self-possessed for such a young man. It is possible that Dahoum’s real name may have been Salim Ahmed—he was also referred to at least once as Sheikh Ahmed too, but that may have been one of Lawrence’s private jokes. In any event, Dahoum, who was fourteen when Lawrence met him, would play a role of increasing importance in Lawrence’s life, and becameone of the many bonds which would tie his life firmly to the Middle East, in peace and in war, over the next seven years.

As the heat increased, Lawrence took to sleeping on the mound, overlooking the Euphrates, and getting up at sunrise to help Sheikh Hamoudi pick the men, and deal with the infinite problems of blood feuds and rivalry between those who shoveled, and thought of themselves as an elite, and those who merely carried baskets of dirt and rocks. Daily, Lawrence was learning not only colloquial Arabic, but the complexities of Arab social relationships, and the dangerous consequences of getting these wrong, or offending Arabs’ sensitivity.

On June 24, he wrote home to say that the British Museum, disappointed in the results so far, had ordered work shut down in two weeks, and that he intended to take a walking tour of about a month. He added a warning, “Anxiety is absurd.” If anything happened to him, his family would hear about it in time. Dahoum had apparently been promoted from one of the two water boys to “the donkey boy,” and Lawrence described him as “an interesting character,” who could “read a few words (the only man in the district except the liquorice-king) of Arabic, and altogether has more intelligence than the rank-and-file.” Dahoum, he mentions, had hopes of going to school in Aleppo, and Lawrence intended to keep an eye on him. Lawrence deplores the intrusion of foreign influence, particularly French and American, on the Arabs, and adds: “The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.” In a postscript he adds that he has now decided to spend the winter walking through Syria (his new pair of boots has arrived), perhaps settling in one of the villages near Jerablus for a time, possibly in the house of Dahoum’s father.

This information may not have alarmed the Lawrence family, but it should have. There was no more talk of working under Petrie in Egypt, let alone any mention of Richards and his printing press. Lawrence and Thompson were to go off and briefly examine another Hittite mound at Tell Ahmar, at Hogarth’s request, and after that Lawrence proposed to go onby himself, walking to those crusader castles he had not already seen. On top of his next letter, written on July 29, from Jerablus, his mother wrote: “This letter was written when he was almost dying from dysentery.”

Lawrence’s letter home gives no hint of this—on the contrary, he writes, “I am very well, and en route now for Aleppo,” and describes his itinerary so far. The letter is unusually short for him, however—surely a bad sign—and in fact, on the day before, he wrote in his diary, “Cannot possibly continue to tramp in this condition,” and collapsed in the house of Sheikh Hamoudi. Hamoudi looked after Lawrence as best he could—though not without a note from Lawrence absolving him of responsibility in case his guest died. This was intended to protect Hamoudi from the Turkish authorities, who would certainly have punished him if a foreigner had died in his care.

Lawrence’s mother was not wrong—he came very close to dying, and owed his life to the patient and determined care of Sheikh Hamoudi and the donkey boy Dahoum. By the first days of August Lawrence was beginning to recover, though he was still very weak, and sensibly concluded that his walking tour could not be completed, and that he would have to go home. His illness in 1911 set a pattern that would persist for the rest of Lawrence’s life—he ignored wounds, boils, abrasions, infections, broken bones, and pain; paid no attention to the precautions about food and drinking water that almost all Europeans living or traveling in the East made sure to take; suffered through repeated bouts of at least two strains of malaria; and kept going as long as he could even when dysentery brought him to the point of fainting. He lived at some point beyond mere stoicism, and behaved as if he were indestructible—one of the essential attributes of a hero.

As Lawrence slowly regained his strength, he used the time to encourage Dahoum’s “efforts to educate himself,” and wrote to his friend Fareedeh el Akle at the American mission school in Jebail for simple books on Arab history for his pupil—if possible, books untainted by western influence or thinking. In the meantime he practiced his Arabic on Dahoum; and with a curious habit of anticipating the future, whichcreeps into his letters and diaries, he wrote to Hogarth that “learning the strongly-dialectical Arabic of the villages would be good as a disguise” while traveling.

While Lawrence lay ill in Jerablus, Hogarth was busy in London, deftly guiding the British Museum toward supporting a new season of digging at Carchemish, since the Turkish government was unlikely to allow the British to start excavation on another Hittite site before this one had been fully exploited. Apparently impressed by Hogarth’s letters to the Times about Carchemish, Lawrence began what was to become a lifelong habit of writing to the editor of the Times about matters that displeased or concerned him. He broke into public print for the first time with a savagely Swiftian attack on the way the Turkish government was allowing important antiquities and archaeological sites to be torn down by developers. “Sir,” he began: “Everyone who has watched the wonderful strides that civilization is making in the hands of the Young Turks will know of their continued efforts to clear from the country all signs of the evil of the past.” Remarking on a plan to destroy the great castle of Aleppo for the benefit of “Levantine financiers,” and on plans to do the same at Urfa and Biridjik, he went on to attack the Germans who were building the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and predicted that “the [Hittite] ruins of Carchemish are to provide materials for the approaches to a new iron girder bridge over the Euphrates,” signing himself, “Yours, &c., Traveller.” The Times, always quick to publish even the tamest of letters—and this one was anything but tame—under a provocative headline, published it on August 9, below the headline “Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia,” predictably eliciting an infuriated reaction from the German consul in Aleppo. Taunting the Turks and attacking the Germans for their activities in the Ottoman Empire was to become a habit with Lawrence in the years remaining before the outbreak of war.

On August 3 Lawrence began his trip home. He arrived in Beirut on August 8, and to his great delight met the poet James Elroy Flecker and Flecker’s Greek wife, Hellй, who were to become his close friends over the next few years. Flecker was the acting British vice-consul in Beirut;he had attended Trinity College, Oxford, where he had been, or felt he was, a misfit, although he had been a contemporary, friend, and rival of the poet Rupert Brooke. John Maynard Keynes, who had met Flecker while visiting friends in Oxford, wrote about him to Lytton Strachey: “I am not enthusiastic about Flecker,—semi-foreign, with a steady languid flow and, I am told, an equally steady production of plays and poems which are just not bad.” There may be a trace of what might now be called gay bitchery in this comment, as well as a degree of genteel anti-Semitism—both Keynes and Strachey were members of a rather refined group of extremely bright, ambitious young homosexuals. Flecker labored under numerous erotic and familial difficulties, none of which he was able to reconcile or resolve: he had been educated at a school where his father was the headmaster, and as if that were not difficult enough, his father was a ferociously Low Church, evangelical Protestant who was half Jewish. Flecker’s swarthy looks made his intense Englishness seem adopted rather than natural, and he rebelled against his parents in every way, running up reckless debts, and indulging himself by writing extravagantly garish poetry and striking exaggerated aesthetic poses that alarmed them. Only by dint of a heroic, last-ditch effort was Flecker able to squeak through the examination into the consular service (a large step down from the more socially and intellectually distinguished diplomatic service). In the process, he did nothing to please either his parents or the Foreign Office by falling in love with a forceful young Greek woman, who braved the issue of his ill health—he was already suffering from tuberculosis—to marry him. More or less exiled to a subordinate post in Beirut, Flecker paid more attention to his career as a poet than to his consular duties.

In Lawrence he found not only a friend but an admirer. Lawrence was deeply impressed by Flecker’s poetry,* the best of which was written after Flecker was exposed to the color and drama of eastern life, and felt as much at home in the Fleckers’ apartment in Beirut as he would a fewyears later in that of Ronald Storrs, in Cairo. Indeed Lawrence photographed Flecker elaborately dressed in a Bedouin robe and headdress—though despite his dark complexion and an inherent love of dressing up in costume, Flecker does not look nearly as comfortable in Arab clothing as Lawrence. Flecker is also a good example of one of Lawrence’s most endearing characteristics: once he became your friend he was your friend for life, and once he admired your work he was a supporter of it forever.

It is a measure of how ill Lawrence had been that he returned to England via Marseille and went on from there by train to Oxford—this route was much quicker (and more expensive) than traveling by sea from Beirut to England. At home, he recuperated under the watchful eye of Sarah, and faced the difficulties so common to talented young men of his age. In his case it was not so much that he couldn’t decide what to do with himself as that he had too many choices and self-imposed obligations. Hogarth, he learned, had secured the funds for a second season of excavation at Carchemish; Flinders Petrie had accepted him for a stint of tomb digging in Egypt; Vyvyan Richards was still eager to proceed with the printing press scheme; Jesus College expected to hear more about Lawrence’s BLitt thesis on medieval pottery; and Lawrence himself was deeply mired in his plan to bring out his expanded BA thesis on castles and fortifications as a book, a project that was doomed for the moment by the number of his drawings and photographs that he deemed essential to the text.

Lawrence’s photograph of James Elroy Flecker.

Although the doctors were strongly against Lawrence’s return to the Middle East, that of course did not deter him. Thompson, he learned, had declined to return unless his wife could accompany him, a suggestion that horrified everyone; and Hogarth replaced him with a young archaeologist, Charles Leonard Woolley, an assistant keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Woolley would go on to a long and distinguished career; he would not only be knighted but serve as the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. Lawrence and Woolley became and remained friends—Woolley was primarily interested in the discovery of big buildings and monuments, while Lawrence worked with the men, honed his knowledge of Arabic, and took care of the pottery finds and the photography.

Lawrence defied the doctors and set out again for Jerablus at the end of November, to report on the rumor that the Germans planned to build their railway right through the mound at Carchemish. When this proved to be untrue (the railway would pass uncomfortably near it, but not through it), he journeyed on to Egypt to join Petrie’s current dig at Kafr Ammar, on the Nile south of Cairo, but not without enduring a terrifying carriage accident on Christmas Day, when the driver toppled the carriage and the horses off a bridge and into a stream. In a letter home on January 2 he comments darkly (and correctly) about conditions in the Ottoman Empire: “Great rumors of war and annexation:—not to be believed yet, but such a smash is coming out here.”

He wrote next from Cairo, giving his family his new address in Kafr Ammar in Arabic script, so they could copy it out and add it to each envelope. The actual digging disgusted him, and prompted one of his darker descriptive passages: “It is a strange sight to see the men [dragging] out amummy, not glorious in bright wrappings, but dark brown, fibrous, visibly rotting—and then the thing begins to come to pieces, and the men tear off its head, and bare the skull, and the vertebrae drop out, and the ribs, and legs and perhaps only one poor amulet is the result…. I’m no body snatcher, and we have a pile of skulls that would do credit to a follower of Genghis Khan.” He found the Nile sluggish, and the brown sails of the boats on it depressing to look at.

A week later Flinders Petrie* and his wife arrived, and it is hard not to guess that the uncongenial nature of the work preconditioned Lawrence to dislike her. “I don’t like Mrs. Petrie,” he wrote home flatly after meeting her for the first time (this was unusual for Lawrence); as for Petrie, who was hugely dignified and full of himself, Lawrence seems to have displayed his dislike of tomb robbing by “taking the mickey” out of Petrie in small ways, perhaps not his most endearing trait. Lawrence turned up for digging in football shorts and a white Magdalen College Boat Club blazer, prompting Petrie to remark that they weren’t here to play cricket. As one of Lawrence’s biographers pointed out, the joke was on Petrie, who did not realize that cricket isn’t played in football shorts (not that Lawrence played either cricket or football). Also, and perhaps more woundingly, flaunting the Magdalen blazer may have been Lawrence’s way of reminding Petrie that unlike Lawrence he “was not an Oxonian, but merely Professor of Egyptology in the petit bourgeois University of London.” Petrie, whose long white beard made him rather resemble God the Father in Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, may have been sharp enough to guess the intention of Lawrence’s choice of clothing, but the Petries nevertheless showed him a remarkable degree of kindness and courtesy during his time there, and Lawrence thawed toward them.

Over time, despite his dislike of digging up mummified bodies (and a general distaste for Egypt, both the people and the way they spoke Arabic), Lawrence came rather reluctantly to admire Petrie’s abilities. Petrie had discovered the first mention of Israel in Egyptian recorded history by deciphering the Merneptah stele, an accomplishment that won him international acclaim; and by linking the styles of pottery shards, he developed a new and more exact method of chronology for excavation sites, something from which Lawrence would benefit in his task of classifying Hittite pottery at Carchemish.

Petrie emphasized that all archaeological research “lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details,” advice from which Lawrence could surely benefit, and with which he agreed. In the end Lawrence not only learned a lot from Petrie, as Hogarth had surely intended, but came to like and respect him, despite their unpropitious first meeting. As for Petrie, he offered Lawrence Ј700, a not inconsiderable sum, toward the expense of two seasons investigating several sites on the Persian Gulf, which Lawrence was very tempted to accept if the resumption of the Carchemish dig fell through.

However, during Lawrence’s one-month stay in Egypt—he may be the only visitor to pass through Cairo without bothering to see the Pyramids—Hogarth had unexpectedly tapped into a wealthy source for carrying forward the Carchemish digging. By the time Lawrence arrived back there early in February, the matter of financing was settled, and the opportunity to dig for Petrie vanished for the moment. Perhaps this was just as well, for Lawrence’s commitment to a career in archaeology was never total. Lawrence was happy at Jerablus—happier than he would ever be in his life again—but he was never tempted by the academic life.

The world of caravans, camels, desert, and Bedouin nomads would hold Lawrence to the Middle East for the next three years, except for brief visits home, and spare him the decision about what career to follow, until at last the outbreak of World War I thrust him into the career for which he had been training himself all his life.

Lawrence arrived at Aleppo to find the Turkish authorities making difficulties about the resumption of work at Carchemish; nor had the moneyarrived with which to begin a new house for the archaeologists, nearer to the site. The years 1911 to 1914 were difficult ones for foreigners in Turkey—the country’s political instability combined with a series of humiliating military defeats and territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire in Libya at the hands of Italy, and in the Balkans at the hands of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, intensified the siege mentality of the Turkish government and its hostility to foreigners, and encouraged fear of the Russians and, therefore, a closer relationship with Germany. In the course of the nineteenth century Turkey had seen itself deprived of all its North African possessions, from Egypt to Morocco, and all its Balkan possessions except for a tiny enclave around Constantinople; of course, this made the Turks all the more determined to hold on to their Arabian possessions.

Lawrence kicked his heels in Aleppo for nearly two weeks, happy to be out of Egypt, buying small antiquities for Hogarth and the Ashmolean Museum, bargaining for a long camel-hair cloak for himself (“such as Bedouin sheiks wear: Baghdad made: very warm and beautiful”), and keeping himself going by borrowing from the British consul until money arrived from the British Museum. He spent much time searching for an armorer who still made chain mail as it had been made at the time of the Crusades, for the benefit of a friend in Oxford who shared his interest in armor. He wrote home often—in one letter, he expresses satisfaction that his brother Frank is keeping up with his shooting, and urges Frank “to do a little revolver work: it is harder than a rifle to learn, and more often necessary,” a typically offhand remark that separates Lawrence from other archaeological assistants, few of whom would have felt that revolver marksmanship was a necessity. He seems to have been reading a lot—Maurice Hewlett’s Richard Yea-and-Nay, a historical novel about Richard I, for the ninth time, Lawrence claimed; and William Morris’s “Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem” Sigurd the Volsung. This is a revealing choice of books. Hewlett was a prolific English writer of romantic historical fiction; he was a friend of Ezra Pound and of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and was famous and successful in his time,though he is largely forgotten now. His novel about Richard Coeur de Lion is a frankly hero-worshipping and meticulously detailed portrait of one of Lawrence’s favorite medieval kings. Morris’s hero, Sigurd, is the central figure of Norse myth and legend, the dragon slayer and hero of the Volsunga Saga, and Wagner’s inspiration for the Ring cycle. Morris transformed Sigurd into a noble Victorian hero, a kind of fantasy preux chevalier, in what one biographer of Lawrence calls “a transparently Oedipal tale."* Both books are about the trials and tribulations of a hero as he passes from one dangerous adventure to another toward his fate: betrayal by a woman. It is hard to imagine anyone reading Hewlett’s novel nine times, unless he identified in some way with Richard I. As for Sigurd’s doom-laden (and pagan) story, it seems unlikely that Thomas and Sarah Lawrence would have shared their son’s enthusiasm. As is so often the case with Lawrence, his interests and enthusiasms seemed to be drawing him toward a life in the heroic mold, for the moment still in the form of literary fantasy, even while on the practical, day-to-day level he pursued archaeology.

Once he arrived in Jerablus, after a three-day walk over rough country, followed by a recalcitrant mule train carrying the expedition’s supplies, Lawrence was like a man back in his element. Physical discomfort, danger, and exhaustion acted on him like a tonic. He gathered a workforce; had the foundations for the expedition house dug; and argued over the ownership of the mound with a greedy local landowner who claimed it, and with a Turkish police lieutenant who ordered him to stop the digging. By the first week in March he was back in Aleppo, to pick up Woolley—there was a certain amount of excitement in the foreign community, since all Italians were being expelled from Turkey because of the war in Libya, and it was therefore possible to buy their collections of antiquities atbargain-basement prices. Then, a week later, Woolley and Lawrence went to Biridjik together, to confront the kaimakam over the order to stop the digging and the interference from the local landowner.

Lawrence might easily have resented Woolley’s presence, since Woolley was senior to him, and a more experienced archaeologist, but fortunately Woolley behaved exactly the right way for an Englishman confronting an Asian official, and told the kaimakam that he would shoot on the spot anyone who “interrupted the digs.” He apparently spoke with enough high-handed vigor and righteous British indignation to cow the kaimakam, who had, of course, arranged the various attempts to stop the digging in the hope of extracting a bribe for himself. Woolley thereby won Lawrence’s instant and lasting respect and friendship. Those who thought Lawrence was mild saw only his short stature, his slight figure, and the boyish shock of unruly fair hair, and failed to notice the icy blue eyes and the large, firm jaw: he was quite capable of acting just like one of Kipling’s pukka sahibs when aroused, and he thoroughly approved of Woolley’s boldly threatening the Turkish police chief in the chief’s own office, as well as Woolley’s parting shot: that he was declaring war not against the Turkish government, but only against the kaimakam.

Woolley acquired further merit in Lawrence’s eyes by admiring Lawrence’s pottery finds (and agreeing with most of Lawrence’s theories about them) and showing a preference for Syrian over Egyptian cooking. Since Woolley could not speak or understand the local dialect, he needed Lawrence to translate for him, as well as deal with the workforce—not always an easy task, since almost every adult male was armed, and every find was proclaimed with a fusillade of shots. Even the cook, “the staid Haj Wahid,” worked with a Mauser pistol stuffed into his sash and a Martini-Henry rifle by his bedroll, and at one point fired ten shots through the goat-hair roof of the tent in celebration; the holes then had to be darned.

By the beginning of April—despite the fact that no building permit had as yet arrived from Constantinople—the stone expedition house was almost completed. Consisting of eleven rooms, “two of them very large,” the Carchemish house was to occupy a good deal of Lawrence’s time andattention over the next two years. It had an impressive courtyard with a graceful stone entrance, and although the house was built of rough-dressed stone rather than adobe, in photographs it very much resembles a largish and rather fashionable home in Santa Fe. This is particularly true of the interior, with its hanging wall rugs; white plaster walls with deep, graceful niches for books and antiquities; carved wooden doors; and beamed ceilings, which look just like the rough-hewn vigas used in New Mexico.

By mid-April Lawrence and Woolley had settled into the new house and were waiting for the arrival (and the approval) of Hogarth. Despite a formal visit from the kaimakam, who had been ordered to apologize to them, Lawrence continued his campaign of harassing the Turkish authorities, picking the lock of the storeroom in which the “poor little [Turkish] Commissaire” kept the antiquities that had been excavated, and in general doing what he could to stoke the discontent in the local workforce against the nearby German railway builders. For the moment, all this was still on the level of undergraduate pranks, but the Middle East being what it was (and is), there would soon be an escalation to violence and the use of firearms. Even Woolley, who came to admire and love Lawrence, was aware of his “essential immaturity” about matters like this. That impression was no doubt accentuated by the fact that Lawrence looked, as Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, remarked, “about eighteen.” Another person who met Lawrence in Aleppo at that time described him as a “frail, pallid, silent youth,” though that remark contrasts with Mrs. Fontana’s description of him as “a young man of rare power and considerable physical beauty.” Much as Lawrence spurned physical relationships with any women (or men), a number of women were strongly attracted to him over the years.

In a long letter home at about this time, Lawrence brings up the possibility, no doubt alarming to his family, that he may go off into the desert to seek out the primitive and nomadic Soleyb, survivors of the pagan predecessors of the Arabs; spend “a spring & summer with them"; then write a book, along the lines of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, devoted to this mysterious people. Lawrence expresses his belief that his book (or books)"would be better, if I had been for a time in open country,” a very different and more demanding ambition than turning his BA thesis into an illustrated book. Lawrence may have lost interest in the elusive Soleyb on learning that they lived on raw antelope meat, though this is not the kind of consideration which would necessarily have held him back—more likely, his growing interest in archaeology and his responsibilities at Carchemish pushed this scheme into the background.

Lawrence’s letters to his friend Leeds, back at the Ashmolean, are often rather franker than his letters home. Admittedly, in writing to Leeds Lawrence attempts to turn every event, however trying and difficult, into a funny story—one learns, for instance, that he and Woolley had prudently taken spare clothes and tinned food with them when they went to confront the kaimakam, since there was a good chance they might have been thrown into prison, and that Woolley had to brandish his pistol again, “when the police tried to hold up his donkeys.” Lawrence was running footraces with the younger and nimbler workers, and painstakingly removing a splendid Roman mosaic floor from a plowed field near the excavation site and reconstructing it as the floor of one room in the expedition house. Since this consisted of 144,000 tesserae (small vitreous tiles) “weighing over a ton,” it was no simple or easy task. In May the eagerly awaited visit of David Hogarth took place: “A breathless hush of expectation…. We’re all dressed in our best, sitting in our empty, swept, and garnished rooms, awaiting the coming of the C H I E F.”

Hogarth’s nine-day visit to the site proved satisfactory—it is typical of Hogarth’s amazing ability to be in the right place at the right time and, more important, to know the right people, that on his way out to visit Carchemish he met in Berlin with the kaiser and obtained from his imperial majesty “his explicit promise to make all right for us with the Bagh-dadbahn people, if there is any trouble,” in Lawrence’s words. Thus the German railway engineers were persuaded to carry away much of the spoil and rubble from the excavation site to use in building the bridge over the Euphrates and in bedding the tracks, thereby saving the British Museum a good deal of money, and speeding up the dig for Woolley and Lawrence.

Among the many things Lawrence learned from Hogarth, perhaps the most important was to go to the top unhesitatingly in any matter that interested or concerned him. Despite a reputation for shyness and a desire to remain in the background, as a young civilian in Cairo in 1914 Lawrence was apparently able to reach the formidable Field Marshal Kitchener to urge on him the importance of taking Alexandretta; he successfully bypassed many layers of military command to deal directly with General Allenby in 1917–1918; although only an acting lieutenant-colonel, he made his arguments about the Middle East directly to Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; and he made his case for reforms in the RAF directly to Air Chief Marshal Trenchard in the 1920s. It must be said that Lawrence seldom used either his fame or his remarkable ability to reach some of the busiest and most powerful people in the world to his own advantage; he used both only in pursuit of causes he deemed worthwhile, or to deflect policies that he thought were ill-advised.

Hogarth was sufficiently impressed with what had been done at Carchemish so far—and by the numerous signs that the remains of a great Hittite city would eventually be uncovered—that he recommended to the British Museum that Woolley’s pay be increased, and that Lawrence be given a salary of fifteen shillings a day for the next season’s digging. In the meantime, Lawrence was using Dahoum to help him reassemble and classify the growing collection of pottery fragments, and teaching Dahoum to act as his assistant in the darkroom. In June, Woolley stopped the dig and went home to England, leaving Lawrence on his own, to spend the summer months traveling through Syria with Dahoum as his companion.

Lawrence’s friendship with Dahoum has been the subject of a good deal of speculation over the years, but it seems very unlikely that there was anything improper or scandalous about it—Vyvyan Richards’s comment that Lawrence was totally without sexual feelings or temptation probably holds as true for his relationship with Dahoum as it held for Richards. Whether Lawrence was totally without such feelings or savagely repressedthem for most of his life is a different question. Given his belief that his parents should never have had children, and his melancholy feeling that his father had given up great estates, a position in society, and a title for a transitory and guilty pleasure, Lawrence may well have begun early on in childhood to suppress in himself even the faintest hint of sexuality—a feat to which his unusual degree of willpower and determination would have lent themselves. The stormy relationship between Lawrence and his mother, and his refusal to be dominated by her formidable will, may have contained a complex, self-destructive reversal of the Oedipus complex: Lawrence not only refused to give in to his oedipal fantasies but suppressed all his sexual instincts completely to do so. This would be a psychological analogue of a “scorched earth” strategy, in which he constantly refused to surrender to sexual urges of any kind until his refusal became a fixed part of his personality, and the source of much of his strength.

Those who were closest to Lawrence and Dahoum, such as Leonard Woolley, have all emphasized that the close friendship between them was perfectly innocent; indeed had this not been the case, there would almost certainly have been a strong reaction among the local Arabs, and either Woolley or Hogarth would have felt obliged to deal with it. If Lawrence had had a physical relationship with Dahoum, it seems unlikely that he would have brought Dahoum home to Oxford to meet his family, as he would do in July 1913, or that he would also bring Sheikh Hamoudi, an unapologetic killer and not by any stretch of the imagination a tolerant soul, or that Hamoudi would have accompanied them had there been anything improper about their relationship.

That Lawrence loved Dahoum is certainly true, and sensing in Dahoum a degree of ambition rare in most Arabs at that time and place, he did his best to provide for Dahoum’s education, and to offer him a broader view of the world. Lawrence’s definition of love was decidedly not carnal—the boundaries he was crossing with Dahoum were those of race, religion, class, and age (Lawrence was seven or eight years older than Dahoum), not sexual. Whether Lawrence had sexual feelings toward Dahoum we cannot know. Certainly, he never expressed such feelings,though perhaps if he had ever allowed them to emerge, they would have been directed at Dahoum. To nobody else in his life was he ever so close, and with nobody else was he as happy.

In some ways, Lawrence’s concern for Dahoum was fatherly; in other ways it was that of an older brother. Certainly he saw in Dahoum the kind of natural nobility he later found among his Bedouin followers, uncorrupted in his view by European or British influence and largely untainted by Turkish overlordship, the equivalent of Rousseau’s homme naturel. That this was in some ways a romantic fantasy is certain—Dahoum was attractive, intelligent, sympathetic, and honest, and all those who met him liked him. On the other hand, he was not a Semitic version of an Arthurian hero as imagined by William Morris—but that was a fantasy Lawrence would follow right through the war to its tragic end, and even afterward, when he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence would seek throughout his adult life the company of men, and if, in that world, he found a kind of comfort, it was only during the few years he spent with Dahoum that he ever found somebody he loved who could share it.

One does not know how the matter appeared to Dahoum—he was only fourteen when Lawrence (then age twenty-two) met him, and he would have had very little experience of Europeans; but young men mature early in the Arab world, and as a result it is sometimes Lawrence who appears younger than his protйgй. Dahoum cannot have been blind to the fact that Lawrence’s friendship raised his status, as well as opening up for him a world of literacy and education that would have been unimaginable to most poor north Syrian Arab boys in the Ottoman Empire. A degree of self-interest may well have been present in Dahoum. Lawrence was his opportunity for a way out of his small village, and out of a future of herding goats or harvesting licorice root for the local agha, and he seized it eagerly; but this does not mean he did not care for Lawrence in return, and it is possible that he may have risked his life for Lawrence during the war. In one of a famous pair of photographs taken at Carchemish, Lawrence is shown wearing Dahoum’s Arab robes, laughing as he tries to put Dahoum’s headdress on correctly; the other photograph shows Dahoum in the same place and pose, wearing his own robes and headdress, looking straight into the camera, and smiling broadly. What is most significant about the photograph of Dahoum is that he holds lovingly in both hands, with undisguised pride, a nickel-plated Colt Model of 1903.32-caliber “Pocket Hammerless Automatic Pistol,” not a weapon he could have afforded to own unless Lawrence gave it to him. Possession of a modern firearm was almost mandatory for any self-respecting Arab male, and Dahoum’s pleasure in holding the Colt is unmistakable. It hardly matters whether Lawrence gave Dahoum the pistol, or simply lent it to him for the photograph; either way, this was a princely gesture in a society where men did not give away or lend their firearms willingly, and Dahoum’s face is lit up with unfeigned pleasure.

Lawrence enjoyed the years he spent working at Carchemish not just because of the constant presence of Dahoum. Lawrence and Woolley, though in many respects an odd couple, got along well; the expedition house was one of the only two homes that Lawrence would build and decorate to satisfy his own taste; and he was living among the Arabs, whom he came more and more to like and respect. In addition, he could arrange his days and nights to please himself, reading until late into the night, going without sleep or food when he felt like it, working in exhausting bursts according to whim. He was a commanding presence among the Arabs and something of a celebrity among the rare European visitors—as well as being a gadfly to the Turkish authorities and the German railway engineers without any interference, for on this subject, Woolley and Lawrence were of one mind, whatever the kaiser may have told Hogarth.

Lawrence notes in a letter home that he has not received a letter from Richards since November of the previous year—a sign perhaps that Thomas Lawrence’s pessimism on the subject of the hand press has at last sunk in. In another letter, he orders a new pair of boots, always a sure sign that he is planning a long journey on foot. Lawrence never fails to fill his family in on the process of educating Dahoum—another sign that the relationship, however intense it may be, is blameless. In mid-June Woolley was to go home to England—the months from June through August were commonly thought to be unbearable for a white man in Syria, though of course this notion did not deter Lawrence—and on June 20 he writes home to say that he and Woolley have already reached the port of Alexandretta with fifteen cases of Hittite pottery to load on board Woolley’s ship, and that they avoided Aleppo because of an outbreak of cholera. Having brought up the matter of cholera, surely alarming to Sarah, Lawrence writes home three days later from Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo—the danger of cholera apparently forgotten—to say that he wants at least three pairs of regular socks and one pair of white wool, and that people come from far and wide to offer him antikas of every kind, which he is buying for Hogarth, for himself, for the British Museum, and for the Ashmolean. He notes that it is a time of unusually intense confusion andupheaval in the Ottoman Empire, since Turkey and the Balkan states are at war. (This war would end just in time for World War I to begin, and would strip Turkey of its remaining European territory.) Lawrence exults in the fact that “for the foreigner [this country] is too glorious for words: one is the baron of the feudal system.” This is a reference to the German railway builders, who, apparently in awe of the kaiser’s message as it filtered down to them after his talk with Hogarth, had ordered their workers to stop work on the bridge while Lawrence bathed in the Euphrates, so as not to inconvenience him. It also refers to the Turkish government’s eagerness to keep the citizens of all the major European powers resident in the Ottoman Empire as happy as possible at a moment when the Turkish army was being humiliatingly defeated in the Balkans. Turkey was a police state humanized by inefficiency and corruption, but even so when an order was given in Constantinople it eventually made its way down to even such remote places as Jerablus, and for the moment the British archaeologists were the beneficiaries.

To Leeds Lawrence wrote, more frankly, about the epidemic of cholera, and about braving the heat and the epidemic to spend a day in the bazaars, “buying glue and sacking and wire gauze and potatoes and embroidery and Vaseline and gunpowder … and bootlaces and Damascus tiles.” In fact, Lawrence had bought up the entire supply of glue in the province (some twenty-six pounds of it) for his Roman tile floor. Although he obtained fulsome letters of introduction to the governors of all the towns he proposed to visit from the newly obliging vali at Aleppo ordering all kaimakams, mutessarifs, mirdirs, and other “government officials to see that I am well lodged, well fed, provided with transport, with guides, with interpreters and escorts,” and despite his request for new boots and socks from home, the long tramp he had proposed to take with Dahoum never took place.

Instead he plunged into caring for the cholera victims in the villages around Aleppo and Jerablus, as the epidemic spread rapidly. It seems to be about this time that Lawrence took to wearing Arab robes, perhaps because he thereby seemed less threatening or less unfamiliar to thosesuffering from the disease, which in those days was fatal nearly 90 percent of the time. He wrote to England for medical advice, and soon he was treating people in the surrounding villages despite the risk to himself. Indeed, he did fall sick himself, with malaria; and he soon found that he had to deal not only with cholera but with an outbreak of smallpox, for which he successfully vaccinated the local children. Giving these vaccinations was very daring, since had the children died, he would certainly have been held responsible.

He managed to get away with Dahoum to the American mission school in Jebail, to work on his Arabic and improve Dahoum’s reading skills; and briefly to Lebanon, where the Fleckers, lonely in their summer home, were delighted to have somebody well educated to talk to. In those days, consular duties were not so pressing as to keep the vice-consul in Beirut during the summer, and the Fleckers had rented a cottage in the mountains with “a big garden, where the pomegranates were in full bloom,” though the views of the sea and the colors of the garden did not serve to cheer poor Flecker up. He was still in debt; he was—correctly—pessimistic about passing his examination in Turkish; and his tuberculosis was getting worse. It may be on the occasion of this visit that “carelessly flung beneath a tree,” he talked to Lawrence “of women’s slippers and of whipping.” The subject ought to have interested Lawrence, whose personality already inclined toward a degree of masochism, but he may not have wanted to share his interest with Flecker, whom he liked but did not see as a soul mate.

He was busy with other things—preventing the Germans from taking (despite the kaiser’s promise to Hogarth) valuable Hittite material from the Carchemish mound for building their bridge, instead of the rubble they were supposed to remove; and carving a beautiful and very impressive winged sun disk into the lintel above the front door of the expedition house. The sun disk showed unexpected skill on Lawrence’s part at stone carving—it was almost five feet from wing tip to wing tip—and was also a typical example of tongue-in-cheek humor, since visitors, even learned ones, invariably admired it as a splendid Hittite relic. Lawrence was particularly pleased when German archaeologists were taken in by it.

It is possible to feel in the letters he wrote during the summer of 1912 a strong preference for adventure over scholarship and a growing reluctance to return home to take up a formal academic career. The very idea of England, with its rich green fields and woods, seems increasingly foreign to him, as if the desert had finally claimed him. He wrote to his older brother, Bob, “I feel very little the lack of English scenery: we have too much greenery there, and one never feels the joy of a fertile place, as one does here when one finds a thorn-bush and green thistle…. England is fat—obese.” There are few references to his plan for expanding his BA thesis on medieval castles, and fewer still to the BLitt on medieval pottery that Jesus College supposed him to be working on. He may, in fact, have settled rather deeper into Arab life than he or Hogarth had intended. He wrote to his youngest brother, Arnold (“Worm”), about a battle he had witnessed from the mound, in which two Arabs shoveling sand into boats for the railway were surprised by a long line of Kurds advancing toward them, to take their boats. The Kurds opened fire with their pistols, and the two sand diggers took off, leaving behind two other Arabs, one of whom “swam for it,” while the other was captured and stripped of his pistol and clothes. The Kurds then used the remaining boat to try to cross the river, but the Arabs massed on their bank of the river and opened fire, eventually driving the Kurds off and chasing after them.* Since most of the shooting was done at 400 yards, an impossible range for most pistols, a lot of ammunition was wasted and nobody was hurt. Lawrence remarks, “Wasn’t that a lovely battle?” but there is a certain glee to his account of the incident, which will be echoed from time to time in his early days with Feisal, when battle was still a new experience.

In August his third bout of malaria drove him back to the comparative comfort of Beirut and the mission school in Jebail, where a Miss Holmes was able to look after him. He reports to his family: “I eat a lot, & sleep a lot, and when I am tired of reading I go and bathe in the sea with Dahoum, who sends his salaams.” His reading list, as ever heavy and impressive, includes Spenser, Catullus, Marot, the Koran, Simonides, and Meleager. For lighter reading he had a novel about the Crusade of the Children, and Maurice Hewlett’s Remy (Lawrence is probably referring to The Song of Renny), which, despite Lawrence’s enthusiasm for Richard Yea-or-Nay, prompts him to write, “I think that Hewlett is finished."* Miss Holmes apparently managed to force a midday siesta on a reluctant Lawrence, and he reports home with evident pride that “she has fallen in love with Sigurd,” an acid test to which all of Lawrence’s English-speaking friends appear to have been put at this time.

By the beginning of October, Woolley had returned and digging was resumed—Lawrence’s work gang fired some 300 shots into the air to celebrate the new season and Woolley’s return, alarming the German railway engineers in the nearby camp, who supposed that an insurrection was taking place. The countryside was in an uproar in any case, since the Turks were busy trying to round up recruits for the army as the Balkan wars dragged on, and the Kurds were threatening to rebel, as they always did when there was any hint of weakness in Constantinople. In a letter to Leeds, Lawrence mentions casually that he has suffered two broken ribs in a scuffle with a belligerent Arab—he treats this incident with his usual disdain for injuries of any kind. Hints of various other scrapes with the authorities and the local Arabs are scattered throughout his letters. It seems likely that at some point he was briefly imprisoned by the Turks, and that at another point he and Woolley were involved in a lawsuit from a local landowner, which Woolley solved in his own swashbuckling manner by threatening the judge. (Under the “capitulations,” foreigners in Turkey were more or less immune from Turkish law.) It is certain that Lawrence was involved in an illicit and secret plot (Lawrence describes it as “the iniquity of gun-running”) to smuggle rifles ashore from a British warship into the British consulate in Beirut, so that the staff members could protect themselves in the event of an anticipated Kurdish rising if the Turks could not (or would not) protect them. The plot involved Lawrence, his death in 1923.his friend “Flecker, the admiral at Malta, our Ambassador at Stanbul, two [British naval] captains, and two lieutenants, besides innumerable cavasses [consular guards and porters], in one common law-breaking.” This gleeful flouting of Turkish sovereignty, involving high British naval and diplomatic figures and masterminded by a young Oxford scholar and archaeological assistant, helps to explain the apparently effortless transition of Lawrence from deskbound intelligence officer to guerrilla leader in 1917. Lawrence also reports that he has been firing an expensive Mannlicher-Schцnhauer sporting carbine, possibly presented to him as a reward for his part in the “gun-running” incident, and “put four shots out of five” with it into “a six-gallon petrol tin at 400 yards"; this is very fine shooting by any standard. He also reports having invented a number of special tools of his own design to help move heavy stones, and having taken up the risky use of dynamite to demolish Roman concrete remains and get at the Hittite ruins below them. It is easy to see that many of the elements that made Lawrence an effective military leader were already in place as early as 1912; it is almost as if Lawrence were training himself for what was to come, but of course he was not.

He and Woolley took the precaution of making friends with the local Kurdish leaders; indeed Lawrence hoped to steer the Kurds toward the German railway camp in case of trouble, but the Kurds remained disappointingly quiet. None of this excitement slowed down the steady stream of Lawrence’s letters home. He relied on his older brother, Bob, a pupil of the great physician Sir William Osler at Oxford and now a medical student at Barts, for medical advice that would help him treat the Arabs—it had been Bob who gave Lawrence the instructions for vaccinating the local children against smallpox, and who recommended the use of carbolic acid and ammonia for the workers’ boils and wounds. Even to Bob, though, Lawrence’s tone is faintly paternal, a blend of advice and warnings on every subject under the sun. Indeed, much as Lawrence disliked receiving advice from his mother, he was never hesitant about giving it out. This was to be a lifelong characteristic—though there were exceptions, such as Bernard Shaw, whose advice on grammar and punctuation Lawrence heard patiently, but mostly ignored; and Hogarth, the one person whose opinions Lawrence instinctively trusted. Lawrence was one of those difficult people who nearly always had to find their own way of doing things, and he turned a deaf ear to any differing opinion, however eminent the source. He would always prefer to fail by doing something his own way than to succeed by doing it somebody else’s way: Lawrence never yielded willingly to anybody. Some of the most terrifying episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom are those in which Lawrence describes his experiences as a largely self-taught demolitions expert, casually dealing with guncotton and detonators, and using his own rule of thumb to determine how much explosive he needed to use to destroy a train or demolish a bridge. Typically, Lawrence presents these scenes as comedy, and notes that the bigger the bang, the more the Arabs were impressed. This was no doubt true, but he risked death time after time as rails, rocks, and pieces of locomotives rained down around him.

Lawrence’s travels around Syria from 1911 to 1914 and his friendship with some of the Kurdish leaders in 1912 gave him a far better picture of the secret Arab societies and of the unrest boiling under the surface of Turkish rule than he is usually given credit for having. Although skeptics about Lawrence have since questioned his claim that he “dipped deep into” the councils of the Armenian and Kurdish secret societies, there is proof of this: on the way back to England for a brief holiday in December 1912, he stopped to give a detailed report of what he knew to the American vice and deputy consul-general in Beirut, F. Willoughby Smith, who encapsulated it in a long memorandum to the consul. Lawrence brought to Smith’s attention the fact that the Turks had poisoned one of the principal Kurdish leaders, and that he had been shown a secret hoard of “eight to ten thousand” rifles and large stocks of ammunition in a crusader castle. The report is detailed, demonstrates that Lawrence had gained the full confidence of the Kurdish leaders, and goes on to mention that young Kurds who were conscripted to serve in the Turkish army were under orders to desert as soon as they had been issued a rifle—an interestingway of turning the Turks’ conscription to the benefit of their enemies! Smith gives Lawrence and Woolley full credit, which seems to confirm that Lawrence was already dabbling in Middle Eastern politics, not as a British spy (if he had been a spy, he would hardly have passed what he knew on to the American vice-consul), but as an unusually adventurous supporter of the Arab cause. That Lawrence’s judgment about such matters was very sound for an archaeological assistant is borne out, for example, by his frequent mention of the fears of the Armenian community and the Armenians’ attempts to arm themselves. (Those fears were certainly proved well founded when the Turks set out to subject the entire Armenian population to genocide in 1915.)

Lawrence had a way of getting involved in matters far beyond the ordinary demands of field archaeology, like smuggling rifles into the British consulate. Echoes of Lawrence’s adventures are strewn throughout his letters—it is possible, for example, that he and Dahoum were thrown into a Turkish prison as deserters from the Turkish army (Lawrence must have been in Arab clothes at the time), and were badly beaten there. Lawrence’s contacts with the Kurdish revolutionaries (and to a lesser extent, the Armenians) seem to have been more in the nature of a high-spirited adventure than of serious intelligence work, but had the full approval of Woolley, who realized that in the event of an uprising in the area around Carchemish the two Englishmen would be at the mercy of the Kurds. Good relations with the Kurdish leaders were therefore a necessary precaution; Woolley even went so far as to arrange for the settlement of a three-generation blood feud between two of the most important Kurdish sheikhs—"Buswari and his great enemy Shalim Bey"—in the expedition house, with himself as the impartial referee, passing out chocolates to the party of “9 great Kurds.”

Visitors to the excavation site were startled to see that the watchman was a villainous-looking, heavily armed Kurdish brigand, whom Lawrence had chosen because his reputation alone would keep away other marauding Kurds in the event of an uprising. Any doubts about what such an uprising might entail had been erased when Lawrence visited thenearby towns of Nizib and Biridjik, in Arab clothing. He found the body of an Armenian Christian doctor still lying in the street in Nizib, two days after the doctor had been shot by Kurdish militants; and he described the Kurdish hill villagers as “running around with guns and looking for another Christian to kill.” Clearly, Lawrence’s habit of wearing an Arab robe and a headdress was already more than a casual affectation; in certain circumstances it was a means of survival, long before Feisal asked him to put such clothing on in 1916.

Lawrence’s short return home took place in part because there was a gentlemanly dispute simmering between Hogarth at the Ashmolean in Oxford and Kenyon of the British Museum in London over which institution should get first choice of the antiquities Lawrence was buying or (more rarely) unearthing in Carchemish; in part because funding for further digging was again in doubt; and in part because Lawrence’s speculations regarding a Kurdish uprising had the no doubt unintended effect of raising, in the minds of Hogarth and Kenyon, questions about his and Woolley’s safety. Certainly the ottoman Empire seemed to be falling to pieces as the Balkan wars exposed all its weaknesses. Before his departure for home, Lawrence commented on the total unreliability of the postal system, the wolves attacking herds by night in close proximity to the dig, the erratic and brutal attempts to enforce military conscription, and the fact that steamships were no longer reliably entering Turkish ports. Lawrence had hoped to bring Dahoum, Sheikh Hamoudi, and perhaps Fareedeh el Akle (his Arab teacher at Jebail) home with him, but the uncertainty about whether to continue the dig had left him short of funds.

As usual, Hogarth performed the required miracle, smoothed over the difficulties with the British Museum, and found funding to resume the dig at Carchemish. Lawrence returned in the third week of January—after a pause of a few days in Egypt, where he made an amicable visit to Petrie’s new site (and “was lucky enough not to find Mrs. Petrie there,” as he ungraciously remarked). In Cairo he visited the famous museum and found a Hittite cup mislabeled as Persian. He made a huge fuss, demanding that a correction be made, and when the keys to the case could notbe found, insisted on having it opened by the museum carpenter with a “hammer & screwdriver,” showing once again how quickly he could take on the identity (and attitude) of a pukka sahib toward the “natives” when it suited him to. To be sure, he did not like Egyptians, but still, there is a certain mismatch between Lawrence in this mood and Lawrence as the champion of Arab freedom. His increasing admiration for the Arabs did not, for instance, make him more tolerant of Negroes, Indians, or Levantine Jews.

He wrote home in February from Aleppo, where the Armenians, in no doubt about what was coming, were “arming frantically” and where there were “snow-drifts, & ice & hail & sleet & rain.” He managed to reach Beirut, but the railway north was blocked by snow in the mountains, and Lawrence was unable to get on a steamer from Beirut to Alexandretta in time to ensure the shipment of the many cases of antiquities piled up there for the Ashmolean and the British Museum. He drew on his friendship with the British consul, who arranged with the Royal Navy to have Lawrence, accompanied by Dahoum, taken to Alexandretta by a British cruiser, HMS Duke of Edinburgh—this kind of amazing good fortune seemed to happen only to Lawrence. On board the cruiser Dahoum was popular with the officers—he seems to have had considerable personal charm. In Alexandretta, another British cruiser took on board all the packing cases—the number of British warships and naval personnel with time on their hands off the Turkish coast is explained by the prevailing fear that the Turkish government might at any moment permit or encourage a massacre of foreign residents (including British subjects), to draw attention away from its defeats in the Balkans. In this matter, as in the buying of antiquities, Lawrence seems to have acted with a certain swagger.

While he was in England, he had ordered a canoe (from Salter Brothers, the famous boatbuilders in Oxford) and had it sent out to Beirut. In it, he hoped to explore the farther reaches of the Euphrates River during the spring—this is another example of Lawrence’s lordly way when it came to those things that really interested him, and also of his determination to make his time at Carchemish, which would now stretch out for at leastanother year, as pleasant as possible. Carchemish, despite the occasional brawls and confrontations with the authorities, was “a place where one eats lotos* nearly every day.” There, Lawrence, in the company of his friend Dahoum, could arrange his life as he pleased, without any interference, provided that he carried out the basic duties of his profession to the satisfaction of Hogarth, whose approval was unfailing.

By the middle of March, despite cold weather and storms, Lawrence already had his canoe in the river, was teaching Dahoum to paddle it, and was luxuriating in the number of objects he and Woolley were at last beginning to produce in quantity. The list is endless: Hittite bronze work and carved slabs of basalt, Phoenician glazed pottery, Roman glass. In addition, the excavation was at last beginning to uncover greater portions of the Hittite city itself. Lawrence and Woolley worked without friction, and to any reader of Lawrence’s letters, it seems at least possible that Lawrence might easily have settled down into the role of an archaeologist and adventurer in the Middle East, if it had not been for World War I. On the other hand, it is hardly possible not to read into his letters a foreboding that some kind of breakup or collapse was impending—that he was enjoying his “lotos-eating” days in the knowledge they would soon be ended. Perhaps for that reason, his interest in crusader castles and in writing a great book about the major cities of the Middle East had apparently gone the way of the thesis on medieval pottery. One senses that he already knew none of these things was going to happen. Certainly the Ottoman Empire in 1913 was, of all the uneasy places in the world, the one in which fearsome threats, anger, and hatred between the subject races of the empire and their masters, and a terrifying mixture of cynicism, corruption, and brutality at the top, seemed most likely to produce a conflagration. Turkey was balanced at the edge of an abyss, having lost all its possessions in North Africa and Europe; itsrulers were determined to hold out for the highest price in the event of war between the great powers rather than risk neutrality and being left out of the spoils of victory, and they were always acutely aware that the majority of Turkey’s population consisted of subject races—Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Christians—who had in common nothing except a desire to get rid of the Turks as overlords and masters. Lawrence, who understood the situation better than most, can hardly be blamed for enjoying himself in his own way for as long as possible.

As the fame of Carchemish increased, so did the number of visitors, some of them American, whom Lawrence much preferred to Germans. At the end of April, having been told by the local boatmen that with the Euphrates in full flood he “couldn’t shoot the railway bridge” in his canoe “without upsetting,” he naturally took “a Miss Campbell, staying with us,” down the racing river, and back up again, drawing a rare note of concern from his father, the expert yachtsman. Lawrence had apparently fitted “a square-rigged sail” to the canoe, and he pointed out in his own defense that even if it did upset, all he had to do was swim back to shore towing it—though he did not say whether Miss Campbell, in the long skirt of the day, would have enjoyed the experience.

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.

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 Ј70 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.* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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-mвchй, was soaked, applied to the stone, and forced into the crevices and markings with a brush and allowed to dry, then removed very carefully.

* Flecker was by no means a negligible poet–his work “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” made it into the New Oxford Book of English Verse, and many of his poems were much admired and praised in their day.

* Sir Flinders Petrie (as he became) was one of the first archaeologists to achieve worldwide celebrity, a trend that would reach its peak with the excavation of King tutankhamun’s intact tomb by howard Carter in 1923. Lawrence himself would contribute something posthumously to the later (fictional) character of the armed archaeologist-adventurer hero, of which “indiana Jones” is the most famous example.

* John e. Mack, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, was a professor of psychiatry at harvard University, and perhaps as a result was apt to see the oedipal myth at work everywhere. What is more remarkable about Sigurd the Volsung is Morris’s determination to infuse nobility into pagan stories of lust, betrayal, and murder and transform them into a high-flown romantic tale, a kind of quest for the holy Grail, but without Christianity.

* Conflict and bloodshed among Syrian Arabs, Mesopotamian Arabs, and Kurds, as well as between Shiite and Sunni Arabs, do not represent a new phenomenon in the area.

* Not quite. hewlett had another twelve years of life and thirteen more books to go, before his death in 1923.

* A pleasing, narcotic fruit on which the Lotophagi, referred to in the Odyssey, Book iX, fed. it produced apathy, and, in the case of odysseus’s shipmates, “as each tasted of this honey-sweet plant, the wish to bring news or return home grew faint in him.” (The Odyssey of Homer, trans. t. e. Shaw [Lawrence of Arabia] [New York: oxford University Press, 1932], 122.)

* Woolley, who subsequently became critical of Lawrence, claimed that the villagers were scandalized because Dahoum had posed naked for Lawrence; but there is no proof of this, and since Young was present at the time, as well as any number of visitors, Arab and european, it seems unlikely. The carving of gargoyles, naked or not, would have been enough to scandalize the villagers, and would still do so in many parts of the Middle east, including Saudi Arabia.

* in fact, given the use that was made during Allenby’s advance on Gaza, Jerusalem, and Damascus of the very accurate maps for which Lawrence was in large part responsible, the turks might have been better off turning down the Palestine exploration Fund’s proposal, rather than merely trying to obstruct it.

* Young, Newcombe, Wingate, and Allenby the reader has already encountered. Dawnay was a tall, lean, perfectly dressed Guards officer, who would become one of Lawrence’s devoted admirers in 1918 (photographed together they looked like Mutt and Jeff), as did A. P. Wavell, and trenchard later on.

* It would be published in 1915 as The Wilderness of Zin. There was also a brief report by Woolley in the 1914 Palestine exploration Fund annual statement.

CHAPTER SIX

Cairo: 1914–1916

There was seen in the churchyard, against the high altar, a great stone four square, like unto a marble stone, and in the midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point.—Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur Like that of almost every family in Britain, the Lawrence family’s life was immediately transformed by the war. Frank, the next-to-youngest, slipped effortlessly and almost immediately into the Gloucestershire Regiment (popularly known as “the Glosters”), just as the Oxford University Officers Training Corps had prepared him to, and was rapidly commissioned as a second-lieutenant. Bob, the eldest, would join the Royal Army Medical Corps as soon as he graduated from medical school. Will, still working as a teacher in India, debated whether to join up over there, or come home. Like many other people, he expected that the war would be over in a few weeks, perhaps won by a great naval battle against the German high seas fleet; only gradually did he become aware that it would be a land war, with no end in sight.

As for Ned, he was at first sidelined, at a moment when young men were volunteering in very large numbers. Some of Lawrence’s critics have wondered why he held back, but the reasons were perfectly simple. First of all, he did not see himself in the role of an infantry subaltern. Second, the War Office had raised the minimum required height for volunteers in an attempt to reduce the excessive number, and Lawrence, at five feet five inches, was well below it. Third, and most important, Field Marshal the Earl Kitchener was determined to have the Palestine Exploration Fund publish its book as quickly as possible.

Kitchener, who had been on leave in England, had been about to board a cross-Channel ferry on his way back to his post in Cairo when Great Britain declared war. A messenger halted him on the gangplank at the last moment with a request from the prime minister that he return to London at once. The Liberal government, divided about the wisdom of going to war in the first place, was notably short of warlike figures, except for the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill, a former professional soldier and by far the most bellicose and self-confident member of the cabinet. Kitchener was offered and accepted, without any particular enthusiasm, a seat in the war cabinet as secretary of state for war. It was felt that his massive and formidable presence would reassure both the British public and Britain’s allies that military affairs at least were in the right hands. The poster of Kitchener, with his penetrating eyes and impressive mustache, pointing his finger directly at the viewer over the caption “BRITONS—(Kitchener) ‘wants you’ Join your country’s army! God save the king,” at once became perhaps the most familiar image of World War I.

It soon became apparent that while Kitchener, the supreme imperial hero and autocrat, overshadowed the rest of the cabinet, his many years as a proconsul in Egypt had given him a certain resemblance to the Sphinx. He spoke seldom, and then in riddles that required considerable interpretation. He did not stoop to explain himself, and his enormous dignity and almost superhuman reputation discouraged his colleagues from asking questions. Whatever else he was, Kitchener was not a born politician. He was not a clever debater at cabinet meetings, and he did not relish the give-and-take of political infighting, unlike his aggressive young colleague Churchill. The result was that the British army and the Royal Navy were directed in very different spirits. Kitchener’s enormous, silent, intimidating presence at cabinet meetings was rather like that of the graven image of worship against which the Lord warned Moses on Mount Sinai.

Although Kitchener was in charge of the War Office, he did not by any means give up his concern for the Middle East; and everybody in the Middle East—including Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar in Khartoum; and Sir Henry McMahon, who had replaced Kitchener in Cairo—still looked to him for advice and direction. Others in the cabinet might be alarmed by the Germans’ swift advance through Belgium, or by the ponderous slowness of Russia’s mobilization, or even by the diminutive size of Britain’s regular army, but some part of Kitchener’s mind was still set on the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal. Despite a secret alliance with Germany, the Turkish government had not declared war, and was in fact vigorously negotiating with both sides in the conflict. Kitchener, who had spent much of his adult life in the Middle East, except during the years 1902–1909 when he was commander in chief in India, still hoped to keep Turkey out of the war, or bring it in on the Allies’ side. He was therefore all the more determined not to admit that the Sinai map survey had been a military expedition, as opposed to an archaeological one. With his formidable memory and his capacity for detail, Kitchener continued to urge the book forward, thus effectively blocking Lawrence (and Leonard Woolley) from joining the army for the moment, and keeping them at their desks in Oxford.

Trying to placate the Turks was all the more important because even before Kitchener had joined the government, Winston Churchill had single-handedly made a decision that brought relations between Britain and Turkey almost to the breaking point. The Turkish navy was so enfeebled after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897 that the then first lord of the admiralty, the second earl of Selborne, on visiting Turkey’s fleet in 1903, announced when he returned home, “There was no Navy!” The army was scarcely in better condition, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Turkey took the extraordinary step of entrusting the modernization of its army to a German military delegation, and of its navy to a British one. To some extent, this can be seen as an attempt to have the best of both worlds—an army trained and equipped by the Germans, and a navy trained and equipped by the British—but it was also symptomatic of Turkey’s attempt to survive by means of a balancing act between the great powers. In order to play the role of a great power in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Turkey would need modern warships, and it thus set out on an ambitious and expensive program to order more than forty ships from European shipyards, of which the two most important were the Reshadiye and the Sultan Osman I.

Laid down in 1911, these were battleships of the British Dreadnought class, among the most powerful and modern warships in the world; the Reshadiye* was built by Vickers, and the Sultan Osman I by Armstrong. The Turks had spread their bet by commissioning each ship from one of the two great rival British arms firms, in the expectation that competition between the two firms would speed up delivery. These two great ships were a matter of intense and widespread national pride—the Turkish government, strapped for cash, had raised the Ј4 million (about $320 million in today’s money) needed to build the ships by asking for public donations. From all over the Ottoman Empire people, even schoolchildren, had contributed toward their purchase, and larger donations were rewarded with a patriotic medal. Both ships were launched late in 1913, and in a charming ceremony the daughter of the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St. James’s “christened” the Reshadiye by breaking a bottle of rose water against the bow, champagne being thought inappropriate for a vessel of a Muslim power. But as the months went by the Turkish government became increasingly alarmed by the long delays in fitting the ships’ armament, and in endless gunnery and speed trials. By August 1914, however, the ships were at last ready for delivery, and Turkish crews were on hand to take them over and hoist the Turkish flag; but before they could do so, on August 1, 1914, armed British troops and naval personnel seized both battleships and raised the White Ensign on each stern. As every day brought Britain closer to war, Churchill, determined not to let two modern battleships go into the hands of a government allied with Germany, had boldly made the decision to “requisition” the two great ships, which were immediately incorporated into the Royal Navy as HMS Erin and HMS Agincourt.

The reaction in the Ottoman Empire to this high-handed act was widespread anger—the ships had been paid for by public subscription, and Turkey was still a neutral country. “In Constantinople the seizure seemed an act of piracy,” in the words of Martin Gilbert. Historians still debate the wisdom of Churchill’s impulsive decision, but of course there was no easy answer. If Turkey was going to join the Central Powers anyway, then seizing its battleships was the right thing for the British to do; if there had been any chance at all of Turkey’s joining the Allies or staying neutral, then it was clearly the wrong thing to do. As first lord of the admiralty, Churchill thought it was better to be safe than sorry regarding two powerful warships.

The act would almost immediately have grave and unforeseen consequences. In the first days of the war two fast, powerful German warships were in the Mediterranean, hotly pursued by a superior but slower British fleet. The German battle cruiser SMS Goeben and the smaller SMS Breslau, both under the command of Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, having failed to prevent the convoy of French troops from North Africa to France, steamed east and managed to outrun and evade the British fleet sent to sink them. “As the shadows of the night fell over the Mediterranean the Goeben increased her speed to twenty-four knots,” wrote Churchill in Volume 1 of The World Crisis, “… shook off her unwelcome companions and vanished gradually in the gathering gloom.” Having thrown off his pursuers, Souchon paused to take on coal from German freighters at Messina; then, instead of entering the Adriatic to seek shelter in an Austro-Hungarian port, as the British expected him to do, he set course instead for Gallipoli, where on arrival he urgently requested permission from the Turkish government to pass through the strait. After several hours of intense diplomatic negotiations the two Germanwarships were permitted to enter the Dardanelles, and were led through the minefields by a Turkish destroyer. They were now safely in neutral waters, and on August 16 they anchored off Constantinople, where, to almost universal astonishment, both ships were immediately commissioned into the Turkish navy, their German crews raising the Turkish flag and changing into Turkish uniforms, with a fez to replace the uniform cap. Thus, in less than two weeks, the Turks had lost two battleships and replaced them with two German cruisers—one of the cruisers, the Goeben, almost the equivalent of a battleship in strength and speed. Practically speaking, this had no immediate effect on the war—although the German ships and their crews could easily dominate the antiquated Russian warships in the Black Sea—but it was a brilliant propaganda coup for the Germans, whose popularity in the Ottoman Empire soared as a result. To most people it seemed to ensure that Turkey would join the war immediately on the side of the Central Powers.

Disenchantment soon set in. Despite the Turkish flag and the fezzes, it began to dawn uncomfortably on some of the less pro-German members of the Turkish government that all of Constantinople was now threatened by the 12.5-inch guns of the Goeben. Still, Turkey showed no sign of entering the war as the great battles of the late summer of 1914 shook the nerves of all those who had believed that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. In the west, the vaunted attack of the German right wing through Belgium—intended to drive to the Channel, destroy the British Expeditionary Force, then cut south to separate the French armies of the north from Paris—came to an abrupt end within sight of the Eiffel Tower at the Battle of the Marne. From September 5 to September 12, this battle produced hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides and a bloody stalemate that would endure for four years. In the east, the equally vaunted “Russian steamroller,” the avant-garde of an army of 6 million men, entered East Prussia and met with a bloody and decisive defeat at Tannenberg, between August 23 and September 2, exposing the incompetence of the Russian high command, as well as the fecklessness and indifference of the czar and his advisers. Illusions were shatteredfrom one end of Europe to the other, among them any remaining shred of belief in Berlin that Turkey was a trustworthy or reliable ally.

Appeals to Turkey’s loyalty having failed, another strategy was called for. On October 27 Rear-Admiral Souchon, who had been appointed commander of the Turkish fleet—an appointment largely intended as window dressing to please the Germans—sailed his two cruisers, supported by Turkish destroyers and torpedo boats, into the Black Sea. The Turkish government—which was now essentially a three-man cabal—may have supposed that Souchon merely intended to make a demonstration, but on October 29 the Turks received news that Odessa and Sebastopol had been shelled, and at least fourteen ships sunk, including a Russian minelayer and a British freighter. The French ambassador immediately asked for his passports,* while the British ambassador continued to negotiate with a deeply divided and hesitant Turkish government—some of its members still hoping to avoid what now seemed inevitable. Then, on October 31, at 5:05 p.m., the Admiralty at last signaled to all British naval vessels: “commence hostilities at once against turkey stop acknowledge.” The two German cruisers had turned out to be a poisoned gift; Admiral Souchon had used them to produce a fait accompli that outraged Russia and brought Turkey into the war at last.

Until early October 1914 Lawrence labored to complete the maps and illustrations for The Wilderness of Zin. He and Woolley had both made efforts to join the army, and Woolley, who was a good deal taller than Lawrence, eventually succeeded in getting a commission in the Royal Artillery and was sent to France, leaving Lawrence to finish the book. Newcombe, and no doubt the always well-informed Hogarth, advised Lawrence to be patient—when Turkey joined the war he would surely be needed in Cairo—and once The Wilderness of Zin was done, Hogarth found him a post in the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS). This cannot have been difficult—the department was run by Colonel Hedley, a member of the committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, who was well aware of Lawrence’s gifts as a surveyor and mapmaker, and was also eager to have him, since most of the officers serving in the GSGS had been sent to France. Lawrence was taken on as a civilian, and his casual manners and even more casual clothes did not endear him to officers working in the War Office. Hedley, who valued Lawrence’s intelligence and skills, does not seem to have minded, but not everybody else was pleased to see a diminutive figure with an unruly shock of long blond hair, looking very much like an Oxford undergraduate, walking around the War Office in a position of some importance. Nor did Lawrence try to help matters by assuming an attitude of respect which he did not feel for senior officers, or by curbing his strong and unorthodox opinions. He was at once disheveled, opinionated, and cocky—not a combination of qualities likely to appeal to brass hats. It may be true that when Hogarth asked Hedley if Lawrence was being helpful, three weeks after his arrival at the War Office, Hedley replied, “He’s running my entire department for me now,” but not everyone was as happy about this as Hedley. When Hedley sent Lawrence off with some maps for General Sir Henry Rawlinson, GCB, GSI, GCVO, KCMG, who was the commander of the British IV Corps in France and another protйgй of Kitchener’s, Rawlinson “nearly had a fit,” and sent him back to Hedley, saying, “I want to talk to an officer.” Hedley was a professional soldier himself, and could read the writing on the wall; and, like Hogarth, he knew his way around. He put Lawrence’s name in for a commission as a “Temp. 2nd Lieut.-Interpreter,” which he received almost immediately, and which was gazetted in the Army List for November-December 1914. (Hedley, knowing all about Lawrence’s time at Carchemish and the Sinai, probably assumed that Lawrence’s Arabic would shortly prove more useful than his skill in drawing up maps.)

In later years, Lawrence, who loved to tell a good story, used to tell people that he had never been commissioned at all, that following Rawlinson’s rebuke, he simply went out to the Army-Navy store at lunchtimeand bought himself an off-the-rack uniform; but his army file makes it clear that he was commissioned on October 23, 1914, and that there was nothing irregular about this except the haste with which Hedley managed to bring it about. No doubt with a little more time Hedley could have managed to get Lawrence a higher rank, but his main objective was to get him into uniform quickly so he could keep on doing Hedley’s donkey work in the GSGS. The only unusual aspect of Lawrence’s commission beyond the speed with which it was obtained was that he underwent neither a physical examination nor any training. That he bought his uniform ready made at the Army-Navy store may be true, however, if we judge by photographs of him in uniform.

With Lawrence’s exquisite gift for timing, he received his commission just a week before the Allied Powers declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Not only did Hedley recommend him “as an officer ideally suited for intelligence work in Egypt,” but so did almost everybody else. Lawrence’s abilities as a linguist and a surveyor, together with his travels through Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Turkey, made it certain that he would be sent to Cairo, where a new, larger, and more cosmopolitan intelligence staff was being swiftly assembled. Lawrence’s companions on the Sinai survey, Newcombe and Woolley, were brought back from France, and a group of “Middle East experts” was picked to man the new department; it included Ronald Storrs, Oriental secretary of the British Agency in Cairo and a disciple of Kitchener, with whom Lawrence would make his first trip to Jidda; Colonel Gilbert Clayton, an experienced intelligence officer with close ties to Sir Reginald Wingate in Khartoum; Aubrey Herbert, a member of Parliament well known for his sympathy with and knowledge of the Ottoman Empire; George Lloyd, another member of Parliament with great experience of the Middle East; and Lawrence himself.

This rather extraordinary brain trust would eventually be joined by the ubiquitous Hogarth, and by Gertrude Bell. The British taste for last-minute improvisation—always contrasted with the grim efficiency of the Germans—is in part contradicted by the formation of the Intelligence Department of General Headquarters, Cairo, which, though improvised, was made up of strong-willed and independent thinkers, with very different backgrounds and experience, each of them in his or her own way brilliant and well-informed, and—except for Clayton, who would become their indispensable leader—none of them a professional soldier. It is doubtful that the German army could have put together such a colorful and opinionated group of civilians to run its intelligence department, or would have paid any attention to them if it had.

Such diversity was unlikely to produce unanimity, nor was it expected to. Herbert and Lloyd were both Turcophiles of long standing, and while everybody wanted to defeat Turkey now that it had joined the Central Powers, there was less agreement on how to replace it. Voltaire wrote of God, S’il n’existait pas, il fallait l’inventer (“If He did not exist, we should have to invent Him”). Similarly, if the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, it would have to be reinvented—a daunting prospect, which would entail resolving the competing ambitions in the Middle East of Britain, France, and Russia, and at the same time attempting to satisfy the mutually hostile aspirations of Arabs (both Shiite and Sunni), Kurds, Armenians, Maronite Christians, Jews (both Orthodox and Zionist), and many others, all of them for the moment living, however unhappily, under Turkish rule. This vast and backward area was at once the strategically vital link between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the birthplace of three of the world’s great monotheistic religions; and Mesopotamia was already recognized as one of the world’s largest reserves of petroleum, just as the navies of the great powers, led by Britain, were converting from coal to oil.

Storrs would later describe the intelligence group in a little poem, with his usual urbane wit, as:

Clayton stability,

Symes versatility,

Cornwallis is practical,

Dawnay syntactical,Mackintosh havers,And Fielding palavers,Macindoe easy,And Wordie not breezy:Lawrence licentiate to dream and to dareAnd Yours Very Faithfully, bon а tout faire. It was not instantly apparent that Lawrence’s role would be “to dream and to dare,” and he may not have even realized it himself yet. He was, in fact, despite his eagerness to get back to the Middle East now that he was in uniform at last, delayed for weeks in London. The “general officer commanding” (GOC) in Egypt had wired the War Office for a map of the roads of the Sinai, which it didn’t have, so Lawrence was put to the task of converting and expanding The Wilderness of Zin into a military document. He belittled his own work, and joked that he had to make up or invent much of it and that he would hate to be sent into a battle using his own maps, but it was finally done by the end of November. He complained that he had now written the same book twice, both times without pay—and on December 9 he and Newcombe finally took the train for Marseille, and from there sailed to Egypt.

He was preceded by a message from the director of military operations in the War Office to the GOC in Egypt, General Sir John Maxwell, introducing him as: “a youngster, 2nd Lt. Lawrence who has wandered about in the Sinai Peninsula, and who came in here to help in the Map Branch.” Not every second-lieutenant is posted overseas with an introduction from one general to another, but even at this early stage of the war, with only one pip on his sleeve, Lawrence was being treated as someone of unusual importance.

Before leaving London, Lawrence had written to his brother Will, who was still in India, advising him to do nothing in a hurry—apparently in recognition of the fact that it was going to be a longer war than Will supposed—and mysteriously warning him, “Keep your eye on Afghanistan.” Now, from Cairo, he wrote again to Will to say that he had beenthere for six weeks, “in the office from morning to night,” trying to make sense of the news that was brought to him from all over the Ottoman Empire, and preparing “geographical essays” for general headquarters (GHQ). To the family he wrote quite a jolly letter, first to express gratitude for their sending his bicycle out to Cairo, then giving his somewhat outspoken opinions about his new colleagues, as well as revealing that he sees “a good deal” of General Maxwell, the GOC, whom he describes as “a very queer person, almost weirdly good-natured, very cheerful…. He takes the whole job as a splendid joke,” an odd description of the general in command of the entire Middle East. Of the two members of Parliament, he describes Lloyd as “very amusing,” and Herbert as “a joke, but a very nice one.” He mentions a few more odd additions to the staff, including Pиre Jaussen, an Arabic-speaking French Dominican monk from Jerusalem; and Philip Graves, the correspondent for the Times of London. Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who had lent Lawrence the money at Petra, had just arrived “on her usual winter trip to Egypt,” and invited him to dinner. In general it sounds as if Lawrence was having a very much jollier and more sociable life in Cairo than at home. The letter reads as if censorship of officers’ mail was not yet being exercised efficiently, or perhaps the Intelligence Department had some way to get around it. What Lawrence did not mention to his family was his remarkably quick jump up the promotion ladder: he had been appointed an acting staff captain less than three months after he had been commissioned as a second-lieutenant.

Lawrence’s dislike for Egypt, Cairo, and the Egyptians had not diminished, even though he seems to have settled in very fast this time. All members of the intelligence staff were quartered together at the Continental Hotel (at ten shillings a day) with a direct line to GHQ, at the Savoy Hotel, and Lawrence bicycled over to his job every morning. His army pay was Ј400 a year, so he was well off in Cairo. He saw General Maxwell frequently—the commander in chief does not appear to have been in any way a remote figure—but Lawrence’s opinions were already his own: “So far as Syria is concerned it is France & not Turkey that is theenemy,” he wrote home. This idea was to form the basis for much of what he did in 1917–1918, but it was far from British policy.

Indeed, British policy in the Middle East was hampered from the beginning both by France’s historic claim to Lebanon and Syria, the origins of which went back to the time of the Crusades and included French support for the Maronite Christians of Lebanon; and by the fact that the British government in London and the government of India in Delhi had radically different ideas about the Middle East. Kitchener had always looked to the Arabs with the thought that given British support they might one day form a dominion or a colony under British rule, creating a British “block” or area that would stretch from the western border of Egypt through much of what is now Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, and extending south in Africa to include Sudan, which he himself had conquered, and of course the Suez Canal, which would then be protected by British possessions, rather than exposed at the extreme western end. To achieve this, it would be necessary to stoke the fires of Arab nationalism and separatism, which in the view of most people burned so low as to be invisible, since “the Arabs” scarcely even recognized themselves as such, and remained divided by region, by tribe, by clan, by religious differences, and by mutual enmity. The gap between the urbanized Arabs of Beirut or Damascus and the nomads of the Arabian Desert was so great as to seem unbridgeable, and the Turks had skillfully played one group against the other for centuries.

From the vantage point of the government in India a very different view prevailed. First of all, the largest single Muslim population in the world was in India, under British rule. Any attempt to ignite an Arab nationalist uprising in the Middle East could hardly fail to inspire Muslims in India to do the same. Worse still, the sultan of Turkey, impotent figurehead though he had now become, was caliph, the commander of the faithful, the successor of Muhammad, the spiritual leader of all Muslims everywhere, and the only person entitled to proclaim a jihad, or holy war, against the infidel. The last thing the government of India wanted on its doorstep was an Arab holy war. Moreover, the government of India, ifobliged to fight the Turks, wanted to do so in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and had in mind for it a full colonial government—in short, rule from Delhi. Properly farmed, it was believed, Mesopotamia could produce grain to help India through its periodic famines, and could be policed by the Indian army. Indeed, within days of the British declaration of war against Turkey the Indian Army Expeditionary Force (which had been at sea for nearly three weeks, waiting for news of the declaration) had landed to ensure the safety of British oil installations in the Persian Gulf. Shortly afterward this force took the city of Basra, where Sir Percy Cox was installed as chief political officer, and announced that all of Mesopotamia was now under the British flag and would henceforth enjoy “the benefits of liberty and justice,” but not of course those of national independence.

Busy as he was with map work, and digesting intelligence reports into concise and useful documents for General Maxwell and Maxwell’s staff—Lawrence described himself self-deprecatingly as “bottle-washer and office boy pencil-sharpener and pen-wiper"—his view of the Middle East was inherently that of Cairo, rather than Delhi. He did not see the Arabs as “natives,” and he had no sympathy for traditional colonialism, whether British or French. He was well aware of events that were taking place in the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire, since he, Woolley, and Newcombe all worked together in one room, and ate all their meals together, so it would have been hard for them to keep secrets from each other, even had they wanted to. Since they worked for Colonel Clayton, they also had a broader knowledge than other staff officers of what was happening. Clayton not only was in charge of the army’s Intelligence Department, which reported to General Maxwell, but also ran the Egyptian civilian intelligence service, which reported to the high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, and in addition was the representative in Cairo of the sirdar and governor-general of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate. For a man with three masters—one of whom, Wingate, combined a high military position and a civil position—Clayton was a model of patience, tact, and objectivity; and unlike many “spymasters” he does not seem to have tried to keep those who worked for him out of the larger picture.

As a result, Lawrence was one of the best-informed persons in Cairo—he made, corrected, and “pieced together” maps; he interrogated Turkish prisoners of war; he kept a record of the positions and the movements of each division of the Turkish army; he wrote and produced (with Graves) the official handbook of the Turkish army for the use of officers; and he was in constant telegraphic communication with London, Paris, Saint Petersburg, and Khartoum. His keenness, energy, and capacity for hard work drew people’s attention—as did his superior tone and his determination to impose his own opinion on other people, however much higher in rank or more experienced they were. Thus he set about changing the whole system for transliterating Arabic place-names on maps, stepping sharply on the toes of numerous experts, and causing considerable distress in the Survey Department.* The head of the Surveyor-General’s Office in Cairo, Sir Ernest Dowson, had once said of Lawrence, “Who is this extraordinary little pip-squeak?” but quickly changed his mind and came to admire him, though adding that the young officer had a rare talent for annoying people when he chose to be difficult. Dowson saw a lot of him, since among other duties Lawrence almost immediately became the liaison between the Intelligence Office, the Survey Department, and the Egyptian Government Printing Press. There is no question that Lawrence was a busy and well-informed young man, so busy indeed that when his brother Will stopped briefly at Port Said on the way home to England to join the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry as a second-lieutenant in March 1915, Lawrence was unable to meet him, and they were only able to speak by telephone. Will reported home in a letter mailed from Marseille that his brother Ned was now a staff-captain and that Egypt was “as quiet as a mouse,” so their mother need have no concerns on his account.

Lawrence certainly knew that Arab nationalists had been in touchwith British high officials in Cairo even before Turkey entered the war, suggesting the possibility of an Arab revolt financed and armed by Britain. This was a delicate subject, all the more so while Britain and the Ottoman Empire were still at peace. In the first place, just as the British government in India was strongly opposed to Arab nationalism because it might spread to Indian Muslims, the authorities in Egypt were reluctant to encourage anything that might bring Egyptians into the streets protesting against British rule in Egypt. In the second place, hardly anybody had a clear idea of how strong the various groups of nationalist Arabs were, or what they wanted, whereas French ambitions in the area were clearly understood. Clayton himself had had several interviews with Aziz el Masri, an Arab figure of some importance in Turkish politics, whose secret support for Arab independence had led to his exile in Egypt before the outbreak of war. He had been lucky to leave with his life, since he had been condemned to death by his former colleagues. Aziz el Masri (or, as Clayton referred to him, Colonel Aziz Bey) was an impressive figure, but since what he sought was an independent Mesopotamia, his ambitions were directly opposed to those of the British government in India, and all the more so once Indian army troops had occupied Basra. Indeed, two of his collaborators, including Nuri as-Said, a future prime minister of Iraq, were deported from Basra to India by Sir Percy Cox.

A more promising approach—that is, one less likely to be vetoed outright by India—had been made before the war, by Emir Abdulla—second son of Sharif Hussein, emir of Mecca—on a visit to Cairo. Abdulla’s concern was that the Turkish government might attempt to depose, remove, or assassinate his father, and replace him with somebody more compliant. This was not an empty threat. One son, Emir Feisal, was in Constantinople, ostensibly as a deputy in the Turkish parliament, but in fact in a position of comfortable house arrest as a hostage for his family’s loyalty; and Sharif Hussein himself had spent more than fifteen years in Constantinople with his family as a “guest” of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The sharifian family was widely respected, even revered, both as being directly descended from the Prophet and for its role as guardian of two ofthe three holiest cities in Islam. Consequently, the family was an object of suspicion to the Turkish government, all the more so since Mecca, in the Hejaz, was so far removed from the centers of Turkish power that before the building of the single-line railway to Medina, the journey to Mecca could take weeks or months. Even after the completion of the railway, there was still a daunting journey of 250 miles on camel or on foot from Medina to Mecca across a forbidding desert dominated by predatory Bedouin. Abdulla’s importance and diplomatic skill were such that he not only met with Ronald Storrs but may have met with Kitchener himself; but neither of them was able to offer any meaningful support so long as Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire were at peace (or to provide Abdulla with the half a dozen modern machine guns he wanted). The moment they were at war, however, Storrs suggested reopening the discussion with Abdulla; and Kitchener, now in London as secretary of state for war, agreed.

Abdulla, speaking for his father, sought British support against the Turks, and after a series of messages from Mecca to Cairo to London and back, it was given, on the condition that the sharif (and “the Arab nation”) assist Britain in the war against Turkey. Kitchener not only had given his approval but had sought the approval of the prime minister and Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, thus committing Britain in principle to arm and finance a revolt in the Hejaz against the Turks under the leadership of Sharif Hussein. The timing of the revolt and the exact meaning of the phrase “Arab nation” were left undefined for the moment; still, at one stroke, Great Britain had committed itself to the creation of an Arab state and to the leadership of Sharif Hussein and his sons. Kitchener went even farther. In his message to Abdulla, he not only alluded to an Arab state but as good as pledged Britain to support Sharif Hussein as a new caliph, replacing the Turkish sultan: “It may be,” Kitchener wrote, falling into language as stately and opaque as that of Hussein himself, “that an Arab of the true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina, and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil which is now occurring.”

Since Kitchener’s utterances, not unlike those of the sharif, tended to be Delphic, it is hardly surprising that his message of October 30, 1914, has been a source of controversy for the past ninety-five years. That and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 are among the most fiercely disputed documents in the history of British diplomacy. It is clear enough, though, that British policy now promised “the Arabs” (without as yet defining who and where they were) a state carved out of the Ottoman Empire if they helped to defeat the Turks, and offered the sharif (and his family) a role of special political and religious importance within such a state, as well as suggesting that he should assume spiritual leadership of all Muslims everywhere (something that was hardly in the gift of the British government). Not surprisingly, these assurances were accepted with alacrity by the sharif, and very shortly afterward he offered the first proof of his allegiance to the Allies’ cause.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire the sultan, though now hardly more than a figurehead, in his role as calpih proclaimed a jihad against the Allies. The proclamation appeared to have had little effect on Muslims in India, in North Africa, or even in Egypt. Although the sharif of Mecca had been expected to announce his adherence to the jihad, he showed no sign of doing so. His silence on the matter was deafening, and registered clearly in Constantinople and Berlin.

It may or may not be true that the British acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind,"* but certainly their policy for the Middle East was improvised in haste and as something of an afterthought, by men who were overwhelmed by the sheer size and ferocity of the war only three months after it had begun. However, when Lawrence arrived in Cairo, British policy, at any rate on the surface, appeared to coincide with his own view, except for the intrusion of the Indian army and government into Mesopotamia, which Lawrence opposed from the start. He plunged into his duties in Cairo with enormous enthusiasm—and daily expandedthem in every direction. He was convinced that British policy would lead to the creation of an independent Arab state, one that would, of course, include “his” Arabs, Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi among them, and would eventually include Syria, where he had spent the four best years of his life.

For a junior staff officer, he seems to have had no hesitation in writing long, opinionated reports on strategy. No sooner was he settled into the Continental Hotel than he prepared an essay on the advantages of seizing the port of Alexandretta (now Iskenderun). The attraction of the scheme was that it could be carried out, in Lawrence’s opinion, with a relatively limited number of troops, would provide the Royal Navy with a major deepwater harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, and would at one stroke cut Turkey off from its empire in the south and bring British troops directly into Syria, instead of having the British fight their way north over the hilly and easily defended territory from Gaza to Jersualem. Kitchener, whether encouraged by Lawrence or not, took a similar point of view, but the Alexandretta scheme was doomed from the start. The French distrusted any move that would bring British troops into Syria, which France intended to have as its share of the Turkish empire, along with Lebanon; also, there was a competing plan, hatched in part by Churchill, to use the fleet to break through the Dardanelles, threaten Constantinople, and open up the Black Sea to Allied shipping.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1915, Lawrence energetically pushed the Alexandretta scheme, apparently without anybody in Cairo or London questioning why an obscure temporary second-lieutenant was dabbling in grand strategy. He went on to write a long, persuasive, closely reasoned report on Syrian politics, which was once again read at the highest levels, where it seemed to dovetail with Kitchener’s opinions. Lawrence’s impressive knowledge of Syrian secret political societies (any political discussion that involved opposition to Turkish rule had to be, by definition, secret), and of the desires of the very different peoples who lived in Syria, was well-informed, realistic, and compelling, as was his conclusion that a functional Arab state would have to include Damascusand Aleppo, and if possible the littoral area and ports of Lebanon, under an administration flexible enough to include desert dwellers and city dwellers as well as Maronite Christians. He doubted that there was any such thing as Syrian “national feeling,” but thought that the binding force of a Syrian state would be the Arabic language, and foresaw the possibility that Lebanon might need to be treated separately because of its large Christian minority. Palestine, he concluded sensibly, would present a wholly different set of problems. Anybody reading these documents would have to conclude that Lawrence’s four years at Carchemish and his travels throughout Syria and Lebanon had given him an extraordinary knowledge both of the Arabs’ hopes and of the reality (and complexity) of the situation in the Arab-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire.

In February, the Turks carried out their long-awaited attack on the Suez Canal, but it failed, since they had counted on an Egyptian uprising, which was not forthcoming. This was the attack that prevented Lawrence from meeting his brother Will. In March the Franco-British naval assault on the Dardanelles took place; it failed when six of the eighteen battleships engaged were either seriously damaged or sunk by mines, so that the hesitant naval commander, Admiral de Robeck—who had replaced the even less bold Admiral Carden at the last moment, when Carden had a collapse attributed to stress—decided to break off the attack. Many people—first and foremost Winston Churchill—have since argued that if de Robeck had not given in to his fears he could have pushed on to Constantinople, and that Turkey might have collapsed with an Allied fleet anchored off the Golden Horn. Instead, the result was that British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops were landed on Gallipoli in April, to take the Turkish forts and allow the strait to be swept clear of mines—an attempt that dragged on until December 1915 and cost the Allies nearly 150,000 casualties, including more than 44,000 killed. The failure at Gallipoli caused the Turkish attitude toward the Allies to harden, and led to the genocide of the Armenians, since they represented the largest Christian population in the Ottoman Empire. It also resulted in the final shelving of the Alexandretta scheme, for which there werenow neither sufficient troops nor sufficient shipping. Other results included a weakening of Kitchener’s position as Britain’s warlord, a setback to Winston Churchill’s career (Gallipoli would raise questions about his judgment until May 1940), and Lawrence’s growing conviction that Turkey would somehow have to be attacked on the periphery, rather than frontally.

In May came news of his brother Frank’s death. Frank had been killed while leading his men forward “preparatory to the assault,” as his company commander put it in a letter to Frank’s parents, adding, in a note typical of the futility of trench warfare on the western front, “The assault I regret to say was unsuccessful.” Lawrence’s letters home after he received the news of Frank’s death are odd. Writing to his father, he regretted that the family had felt any need to go into mourning: “I cannot see any cause at all—in any case to die for one’s country is a sort of privilege.” To his mother he wrote, “You will never understand any of us after we are grown up a little. Don’t you ever feel that we love you without our telling you so?” He ended: “I didn’t say good-bye to Frank because he would rather I didn’t, & I knew there was little chance of my seeing him again; in which case we were better without a parting.” The letter to his mother makes it clear that even over a distance of thousands of miles, the old conflict between them was continuing undiminished. Clearly, despite the pain of Frank’s death, his mother was still anxious to be reassured that her sons loved her, and Lawrence was still determined not to say so. His disapproval of the fact that the family was mourning Frank and his slightly defensive tone at not having been able to say good-bye are typical of Lawrence’s lifelong effort to cut himself off from just such emotions—a kind of self-imposed moral stoicism, and a horror of any kind of emotional display. “You know men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, & a thing to be forgotten until after it comes,” he writes to his mother; this is neither consoling nor necessarily true. It is exactly the kind of romantic bunk about war that Lawrence himself was to dismiss in some of the more brutally realistic passages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Some allowance must be made of course for the patriotic feeling and thewillingness to endure pain and death that separate Lawrence’s generation from those that followed it. These traits are exactly why Rupert Brooke’s romantic war poems seem so much harder to understand or sympathize with than the bitter, angry war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. Even so, Lawrence’s letters to his father and mother after Frank’s death seem harsh, and full of what we would now think of as the false nobility of war—putting a noble face on a meaningless slaughter. Frank’s own letters home are full of similar sentiments: “If I do die, I hope to die with colours flying.” This kind of high-minded sentiment about the war was shared by millions of people, including the soldiers themselves, although by 1917 it was wearing thin for most of the troops, as bitter postwar books like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We demonstrate. Lawrence, who would become a friend and admirer of both authors, would in the course of time proceed through the same change of heart as they did; hence the savagery, the nihilism, and the sense of personal emptiness that run through Seven Pillars of Wisdom.* Then, too, in May 1915, though Lawrence was in uniform, he was not fighting. However determined he may have been to be knighted and a general before he reached the age of thirty—he still had four years in which to accomplish these ambitions—he had not as yet made the first step toward active soldiering, and was beginning to feel a certain uneasy guilt. “Out here we do nothing,” he complained to his mother. “But I don’t think we are going to have to wait much longer.” This was probably not a prediction she wanted to receive with the death of one son on her mind; nor was it accurate, since almost eighteen months would pass before Lawrence was in action.

Communications between Cairo and Mecca, in 1914 and 1915, may be likened to putting a letter in a bottle and throwing it into the Hudson River in New York City in the expectation that it will eventually reach the person to whom it is addressed in London. After the message from Kitchener promising British support for an Arab state was passed on to Mecca, a long silence ensued. This was partly because communications of any kind were dangerous—contact with the British was treason—and partly because Sharif Hussein was extremely cautious. He took the precaution of sending his son Feisal to Damascus and Constantinople, to meet with Jemal Pasha, the “minister of the marine,” who had been put in charge of the campaign to attack Egypt and in general of the entire Arab population of the southeast, and with whom Feisal exchanged courtesies; and to meet more secretly with the Syrian nationalist organizations, to see whether they would support the sharif as their leader, and to try to define exactly what the borders of an Arab state should be. This was a mission that could have cost Feisal his life, but his gift for secrecy and for Arab politics exceeded even that of his elder brother Abdulla. His position, as well as that of his father and his brothers, was made more delicate by the fact that the French consul in Lebanon, Franзois Georges-Picot, on returning to France after the declaration of war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, had left behind in his desk drawers a mass of incriminating correspondence with most of the major Arab nationalist figures, including messages implicating the sharif of Mecca himself. All this was now in the hands of Jemal Pasha, permitting him to play a sinister and protracted cat-and-mouse game with Arab political figures—with tragic consequences for many of those mentioned in the documents.

In the summer of 1915, after conversations with Arab nationalists who had made their way to Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, with the blessing of Kitchener and the war cabinet, issued a declaration promising that after victory Britain would recognize an independent Arab state; for the moment, he did not define its borders. The fact that the British had unilaterally transformed Egypt, which was, in theory, part of the Ottoman Empire, into a “protectorate” with McMahon as “high commissioner” made Arab nationalists nervous about Britain’s intentions, all the more so because the French made no secret of theirs.

It was hoped that the declaration of a future Arab state would calm these fears, and perhaps persuade the Arabs to take up arms against the Turks, but all it produced was a note from Sharif Hussein to McMahon, which took almost a month to reach Cairo, and in which Hussein outlined the Arab demands for an independent state in great detail, repeating almost word for word what his son Feisal had heard in the secret talks with Arab nationalists in Damascus and Constantinople. These demands stunned McMahon. Great Britain was asked to recognize an Arab state that extended from the Mediterranean littoral in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east, and from the northernmost part of Syria to the Indian Ocean in the south (excluding Aden, which was already in British hands). In modern terms, this area would include Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon. Since, in the words of Hussein, “the entire Arab nation is (God be praised!) united in its resolve to pursue its noble aim to the end, at whatever cost,” an affirmative reply was requested within thirty days of receipt of the message.

To say that McMahon was taken aback by this message would be putting it mildly. For one thing, the area included a number of powerful Arab leaders who were no friends of the sharif of Mecca, including his rival ibn Saud, who was under the protection of the government of India; for another, the British themselves had designs on Iraq, where British and Indian troops were already fighting the Turks, and on Palestine, which they regarded as necessary for the protection of the Suez Canal. After consulting the war cabinet and the Foreign Office, McMahon set out to write a temporizing note—no easy task, especially given the prevailing phrasing of notes to and from Mecca. His reply begins:

To the excellent and well-born Sayyed, the descendent of Sharifs, the Crown of the Proud, Scion of Muhammad’s Tree and Branch of the Quraishite Trunk, him of the Exalted Presence and of the Lofty Rank, Sayyed son of Sayyed, Sharif son of Sharif, the Venerable, Honoured Sayyed, his Excellency the Sharif Hussein, Lord of the Many, Amir of Mecca the Blessed, the lodestar of the Faithful, and the cynosure of all devout Believers, may his Blessing descend upon the people in their multitudes! It continues in much the same impenetrable style. The sharif’s notes, equally full of compliments, titles, blessings, and protestations of respect, are even more opaque, so that the sense has to be teased out of each beautifully crafted sentence like the meat from a nut, then parsed the way orthodox Jews parse the old Testament, repeating every sentence over and over again in search of its truest meaning.

Despite the flowery beginning, McMahon’s first message poured cold water on the projected borders of “Arab lands,” as defined by the nationalist groups in Damascus and by the sharif of Mecca. Stripped of its polite decoration, his reply was that discussion of the precise borders of an Arab state would have to wait until after victory. The sharif’s reply to this, in September, took the form of a fairly sharp rebuke, though even an admirer of his, the pro-Arab historian George Antonius, remarks that it “was a mode of expression in which his native directness was enveloped in a tight network of parentheses, incidentals, allusions, saws and apothegms, woven together by a process of literary orchestration into a sonorous rigmarole.” It was not sufficiently florid, however, to conceal the sharif’s irritation at what he describes as McMahon’s “lukewarmth and hesitancy,” which was reinforced by the arrival in Cairo of an Arab officer, Muhammad Sharif al-Faruqi, a Baghdadi, who had crossed over to the British lines at great risk to convey the fact that the sharif’s demands were essentially the same as those of the Arab nationalist groups, and not by any means those of the sharif alone.