Lawrence of Arabia Page 2

  But this habit of study did not accord with the normal examination course. It was more suited, as he was more suited, to the mediæval conception of university studies. In the circumstances he was fortunate to have chosen Oxford, and not a more modern, mass-production university. It was suggested that to compensate his neglect of the usual course of reading, he should submit a thesis on some special subject. He chose—“The Influence of the Crusades on the Medieval Military Architecture of Europe.”

  Towards it he had already behind him the knowledge gained from his visits to the castles of France and Britain. He now decided to spend the long vacation before he took “Finals” in seeing the castles of the Crusaders in Syria, and also, characteristically, in tracking down remains of a more remote race, the Hittites, whose remains he had been studying with Dr. Hogarth. Contrary to what has been said, T.E. had known Hogarth some time before he conceived this visit to Syria—“I had attracted his notice by the way I arranged the medieval pottery cabinets in the Ashmolean, which had been neglected.” This was the first link in a momentous chain of causation. When he mooted his idea of spending the “Long Vac” in Syria Hogarth warned him that the summer was a bad season for such a journey, and that in any case it would mean considerable outlay on the necessary retinue and camp-equipment. To this T.E. replied that he was going to walk, and going alone. The fact of walking would entitle him to hospitality in the villages he passed through. “It would also,” he admitted later, “have led to my immediate arrest by the suspicious Turkish Government—but Lord Curzon obtained for me, from the Turkish Cabinet, an open letter to its governors in Syria, to afford me every assistance! This was a piquant passport for a tramp to carry.”

  Even so, it was a hazardous adventure, but he carried it through successfully despite a return of malaria and a narrow escape from murder. First he tramped on foot through the country over which Allenby’s cavalry would sweep like a flood some ten years after—with himself on their flank. From Beirut he went to Sidon, thence past Lake Huleh (the Waters of Merom) into Trans-Jordan, back by Nazareth and over Carmel to Acre and then up the coast to Antioch, on a varying course that made his route like a spider’s web over mountain Syria. After visiting, and photographing in detail, some fifty of the ruined castles in Syria he pushed on northward beyond Aleppo to Aintab, where he collected a number of Hittite seals, and then turned east across the middle reaches of the Euphrates to Urfa and Harran.

  He had picked up a smattering of conversational Arabic from a Syrian Protestant clergyman living in Oxford, the Rev. N. Odeh, and he improved it with practice in the Syrian villages where he lodged at night, usually in the Sheikh’s house if there was no khan, or inn. To a man more dependent on comfort the hospitality that he received in these poor quarters would have been a hardship, but to T.E. it was merely an interesting experience. He had no craving for European drink or meat, and none of the usual European’s qualms over using his hand in place of spoon and fork. Although he looked a mere boy, more youthful than his actual years, there was something in his manner that commanded the attention of the Arabs, just as it did of the more perceptive among Europeans he met.

  It was during the last stage, near the Euphrates, that a covetous Turkman, mistaking his cheap copper watch for gold, followed in his tracks and eventually seized a chance to spring on him and bring him down. The Turkman tried to kill him with his own Webley pistol, only to be foiled because Lawrence pulled out the trigger-guard, so collapsing the pistol, before the Turkman wrested it away. Even so, nothing but the accidental intrusion of a shepherd prevented him from smashing T.E.’s head. Thus reprieved, T.E.. with a bad headache, walked to the nearest town and would not rest until he had obtained the help of a body of Turkish police whom he brought back, to the village where the robber had taken refuge. After a lengthy argument the man was surrendered and his booty restored. “What I was really after were my Hittite seals, not the watch!”

  The adventure failed to cure T.E. of his love of solitary wandering. Indeed, actual contact with the Bedouin had replaced their idealistic attraction for him with a stronger tie, while loosening the uneasy and already precarious hold of civilized habits. He may have lost his romantic ideas about the Bedouin themselves—at any rate he has none now—but he was drawn to their way of life. The desert, like the. malaria, was in his blood.

  He had not long to wait for a chance to feel it again. Once back at Oxford, after a four months’ tour, he settled down to prepare his thesis. Its general trend was that the Crusaders had brought more military architectural science to Syria than they took away, and that their work owed little to Byzantine influence. The thesis gained him first class honours in the final examination for his degree. Despite the impression it made he refused to print it, on the ground that it was only a preliminary study and not good enough to publish. He now thought of doing a fourth year and taking a B.Litt. on mediæval pottery.

  But, better than a “first” he had gained the admiration of Hogarth, who was henceforth his patron and the familiar spirit who presided over his fortunes. “I owe to him every good job I’ve had except my enlistment in the Air Force.”

  “Trenchard let me in to the RAF. Till then D.G.H. had been a godfather to me: and he remained the best friend I ever had. A great man.”

  It was Hogarth who now Induced Magdalen College to give him a four years’ senior demyship, or travelling endowment, and took him on the British Museum expedition to Jerablus on the Upper Euphrates, the presumed site of ancient Carchemish of the Hittites. On this first trip T.E. was a handyman who proved his value best of all by his knack of keeping the native labour-gangs in a good humour. But in addition he did all the pottery, and produced, before the season ended, a complete stratification of types and rims from the surface to thirty feet down; also he did the photography.

  When the November rains came and interrupted the work, Hogarth sent T.E. to Egypt in order that he might learn something of scientific methods of digging under Sir Flinders Petrie, whose camp was near the Fayoum. There is a good story that T.E. asked at the station how he could find the Petries, and was told “to walk in the direction of the desert till he saw flies swarming and then make for where the flies were thickest and there he would find Flinders Petrie.” The latter, however, if careless, revealed an amusing streak of conventionality. For T.E.’s appearance in the shorts and blazer that he had been accustomed to wear at Carchemish drew from the great Egyptologist the Ironical reproof—“Young man, we don’t play cricket here.” The Irony was greater than he Imagined, for his apparent haziness as to the difference between the garbs of cricket and football was surpassed by T.E.’s aversion to any game. But although it was not long before Flinders Petrie corrected his first Impressions of the new recruit, T.E. himself found that excavation in Egypt soon palled. It had reached a point where it lacked the lure of the unknown that still surrounded the Hittite civilization, and it had become too minutely organized a branch of research for his taste.

  He returned to Carchemish again the following year with Hogarth, and subsequently assisted Woolley there right up to the coming of war in 1914. The work offered plenty of variety, for his province embraced the photographs, sculpture, pottery and the copying of inscriptions. Twenty years later he remarked—“It was the best life I ever lived”—better even than the R.A.F. that was the refuge of his maturity. Even in the off-seasons, during the long winter floods and the heat of the summer, he only went home occasionally for short spells, and spent the rest of the time travelling round the Middle and Near East, or staying at the diggings alone. During the digging season he received fifteen shillings a day; during the rest of the year, while travelling, he lived on his demyship of a hundred pounds a year, supplemented by casual earnings of queerly varied kinds. Once, for example, he took on a checker’s job in coaling ships at Port Said. In five years he came to know Syria like a book, much of north Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Egypt and Greece. He was always going up and down, “Wherever going was cheap.”

 
The solitary spells at Carchemish not only saved money but gave him a better opportunity to make contacts among the local Arabs and Kurds, and through close acquaintance to reach an understanding of their ways and thoughts. Although he was not, and never would be, an Arabic scholar—he has always been most frank in refuting this popular belief—he learnt to talk it well enough for conversational purposes, and his limitations were covered up by his fluency, if also by his profound understanding of native ways. This was more than, indeed essentially different from, the acquired knowledge of the outside observer. “Particularly, my poverty let me learn the masses, from whom the wealthy traveller was cut off by his money and attendants.” it was an immersion in them, by sympathetic projection. And by this faculty he came to perceive what he expressed later—when it was the secret of his power—in the words—“Among the Arabs there were no distinctions, traditional or natural, except the unconscious power given a famous sheikh by virtue of his accomplishment; and they taught me that no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks’ food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.”

  It was by this complete abandonment not only of the conventions but of the resources of civilized life, by what other Europeans would have considered an abasement, that T.E. became a naturalized Arab instead of merely a European visitor to the Arab lands. He was helped by his indifference to the outward deference that other Europeans, and especially Englishmen, demand. And the way was eased by his tramp habits and outlook. From a “street Arab” to a “white Arab” was not a difficult transition.

  It was while at Carchemish that he adopted the habit of wearing native dress on occasional and specific wanderings. Short and slight, fair and clean-shaven, he was apparently the last man to carry off such a guise successfully, and his obvious incongruities have provoked scornful comment from various European experts in externals. Yet there is ample evidence that by the Arabs he was accepted, if not mistaken, for one of themselves. According to him that was not difficult in Northern Syria “where the racial admixture has produced many fair natives, and many with only a broken knowledge of Arabic. I could never pass as an Arab—but easily as some other native speaking Arabic,” Yet here he passes over the deeper explanation—his ability to get inside an Arab’s skin when donning his outer garments. It was the more easy for T.E. to do so because he already shared the Arabs’ deep-rooted desire for untrammelled freedom, and had no more desire than they had for the material possessions that offer comfort at the price of circumscription. In the desert he found, like them, the stark simplicity that suited him, and although he never lost the power to adapt himself to, and appreciate, the more subtle pleasures of civilized society, it was in the desert that he found the solitude that satisfied his deepest instinct.

  But to imagine him as always brooding would be essentially false. He was no hermit. It would be nearer the truth to say that he was always perceiving. And that reflection on these impressions was a process of swift mental appreciation rather than meditation. Such at least is my own impression, which may be right or wrong, for all those who meet Lawrence see a facet of his personality that largely depends on their own cast of thought, and so is often different. Moreover, the same man at different meetings may see different aspects. It has led some of his friends to christen him the “human chameleon.” But this term hardly fits the figure, or conveys the idea, so well as if one says that he is essentially dynamic or, better still, fluid—in the likeness of mercury, divisible into globules yet inherently coalescent. Perhaps his own explanation is better still—“at an O.T.C. field day I was once told to disguise myself as a battalion in close order: and have done, ever since!”

  There is a curious duality in T.E.’s appearance. At a casual glance he may easily escape notice, owing to his short stature, his weather-reddened face, and a dull look that often serves as a convenient mask when he wants to merge into the background. But at a closer view one is struck by the size of his head, with its rampant crest of fair hair springing from the high forehead, and the strangely penetrating blue eyes, whose predominant expression is kindly yet remote. The size of the head would be more noticeable if it were not for the way that the intellectual brow is balanced by the strong jaw, which in turn redresses, and seems to be controlling, the sensuous shape of the mouth. The general effect in repose is rather severe, but it disappears when he speaks or smiles—he has a voice of extraordinary charm and an utterly disarming smile.

  It is in the mouth that one may perhaps trace an aspect of T.E. that is more misunderstood than any other—an extreme sensuousness that is entirely unsensual, in the accepted meaning. For what most astonishes the public is his disregard of the pleasures that the ordinary man pursues and his relish for what other men would regard as discomforts to be avoided. Thus he speaks of himself as sexless; meaning that he is devoid of sexual appetites. He takes no interest in food, and when by himself is satisfied with one meal a day, of the simplest kind, although he will eat a normal dinner when with friends. Fruit, especially apples, is the only form of food for which he seems to have any real liking. He neither drinks, nor smokes. He has occasionally tasted wine, but prefers water as being more varied in flavour. This is not a jest: his senses are very highly developed—but different. He says himself that he hunts sensation—in the deeper sense of the word. He is always eager for a new sensation, but he does not repeat it if unpleasant. Pleasure and pain, as he emphasizes, are matters of individual judgment. He finds exhilaration in what other men would shrink from, and pain in what are often their pastimes. “High diving would be pain”—it is a question of difference of tastes, not of a taste for discomfort. And in his judgment “the more elemental you can keep sensations, the better you feel them.” A taste for wine mars the more subtle appreciation of water.

  This explanation may serve to modify the common assumption that his way of life can be ascribed to an innate asceticism. He declares himself that he is “not an ascetic, but a hedonist.” The denial is easier to accept than the affirmation—when one remembers how the brow balances the jaw, and the jaw controls the mouth. His “hedonism,” itself different from the normal, is an essential part of him: but it is only a part. It helps us, however, to understand his “Street Arabism.”

  On his excursions, he has told me—“I travelled always with someone from our Carchemish digging gang, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, taking a few camels on hire-carrying, sailing down the Syrian coast, bathing, harvesting and sight-seeing in the towns.” Urfa, in particular, made a lasting impression on him by its bazaars and magnificent Byzantine castle. One of his expeditions in the valley of the upper Euphrates gave him, however, a far less pleasant memory and an awkward adventure—the first of his two enforced “enlistments” in the Turkish Army.

  Lured by the report of a statue—of a woman seated on the backs of two lions—that might have been Hittite he set off in native dress accompanied by one of his workmen. The district was too north for Arabs to wander and near Birijik he and his companion were arrested as suspected deserters from the Turkish Army. They were kicked down the stairs of a noisome and verminous dungeon, T.E. being bruised all up one side and his fellow-prisoner suffering a bad sprain. They were left all night in confinement to contemplate the prospect of compulsory military service; but in the morning T.E. managed to bribe their guards to let them go.

  At Carchemish the outlets T.E. found were characteristic. His time was not merely divided between the excavations at the great mound and wandering among the natives. He went for bathes daily in the Euphrates, and added zest to them by building a water-chute of clay, down which he used to toboggan into the river. He made frequent trips on it, defying its dangerous currents, in a canoe fitted with a small auxiliary motor of uncertain ways which he brought out at a cost he could ill afford. Water work had come to him naturally, from his childhood in his father’s sailing yachts, and he had been an adept in handling a canoe ever since his school-day river explorations at Oxford. He practised s
hooting, with automatic pistols at matchboxes and other minute targets, until he became an exceptionally fine shot. Indoors, he spent hours in developing the photographs that were his speciality, but he also found time to continue this reading. The hut where he abode, when he did not sleep in the open as he often chose, contained a library that gave the place an air of Oxford-on-the-Euphrates.

  With the native workmen, mainly Kurds and Arabs, relations were more than good. If this enviable state owed much to T.E.’s way of conversing with them, the devotion he inspired was even more a tribute to his strength of character and, in particular, his quietly fearless air.

  Sir Hubert Young, who was one of his visitors, relates that “by his mere personality he had turned the excavation into a miniature British consulate,” and tells a story of “his way of asserting his position as the unofficial Qonsolos, or representative of the great British Government.” When out on a trip by canoe they came upon several stalwart-looking Kurds who were dynamiting fish. T.E. walked straight up to the biggest, reminded him that it was against the Turkish law, added that it was “a shameless thing to do,” and ordered the man to come with him to the police station. The Kurd looked down contemptuously at him and declined emphatically, whereupon T.E. seized him by the arm and began to march him off. The other Kurds followed, however, throwing stones and drawing their knives. The situation looked ugly, and at Young’s urging, T.E. released his prisoner. But, unwilling to be defied, he went straight to the nearest police post, and when he found the inspector showing signs of typical Turkish inertia, stirred him into activity by a threat to have him removed, as his predecessor had been.

  Several opportunities of character test were provided by the German engineers then engaged in bridging the Euphrates at Carchemish to carry the famous Baghdad railway, the instrument of such ambitious designs. While T.E. was away in the Lebanon, and Woolley home on leave, the Germans attempted to utilize some mounds of archaeological importance to build up their railway embankment. After vain protest, the Arab overseer left in charge mounted guard over the mounds with a rifle and threatened to shoot anyone who came near. Meantime T.E., who had himself been notified by telegram, telegraphed to Constantinople and collected a high Turkish official, with whom he made a dramatic appearance on the scene to the discomfiture of the Germans, who were compelled to abandon their plans.