If Lawrence stood slightly aloof from his English colleagues, he was more at ease with the Arabs, whom he regarded with the paternal benevolence of the autocrat. His relationship with them was not one of equality. It was Alec Kirkbride who later commented that Lawrence was more apt to like those who were his juniors in age and standing, and Lawrence himself later talked much of the satisfaction to be found in living among the lowest strata of society. His first response to the Arabs, though, was aesthetic: they were fine-looking chaps, he thought, though most were thin as rakes, and few were taller than himself. He was fascinated by their culture and set himself the task of learning all about their customs and language. Not only did he learn the names of all the workers, he also quickly assimilated the names of their tribes and families, and the nature of their relationships. Lawrence understood almost instinctively that in the Arab world a man is more than an individual: that his family and kinship ties define him. Soon this knowledge gave him a special standing among the local people, and he was able to use it effectively as a psychological weapon, pointing fun at slack workers by bringing up some skeleton in the family closet. This was not morally defensible but it was an effective style of management, and within months of his arrival Lawrence had become a sort of unofficial arbiter of disputes, sorting out the jealousies between pickmen, shovellers and basketmen, separating members of families with blood-feuds between them, settling fights, castigating the water-boys for falling short, advising a man on the payment of bride-price, bailing another out of prison, and driving away an Armenian tobacco-seller he suspected of trying to buy antikas. He even took pride in doctoring their injuries, treating scorpion-stings and dressing cuts they had received from tools or falling rocks. He began to behave and think, in fact, like the model British District Officer in a backwater of the Empire, administering ‘his’ natives: ‘Thompson and I have to be doctors and fathers, & godfathers and best men to all of them,’ he wrote.¹⁴ He might have been echoing any decent-minded British colonial official carrying ‘the White Man’s Burden’ when he told his mother: ‘Our people are very curious and very simple, and yet with a fund of directness and child-humour about them which is very fine.’¹⁵ Before his eyes, the Arabs had been transformed into noble savages, and while in 1909 he had praised the ‘civilizing’ influence of foreign missions, he now condemned them for introducing foreign ideas which ‘vulgarized’ traditional culture. The ‘vulgar’ educated Arab, worldly-wise and aspiring to power beyond his control, was a threat. Far better the ‘noble’ traditional Arab who knew his place, who treated him with unselfconscious and forthright respect, and never challenged his right to dominate. Since Lawrence was the one who hired and fired the men, he had absolute power over their fortunes, and there is no doubt he enjoyed that power: ‘It is a great thing,’ he wrote, ‘to be an employer of labour.’¹⁶ He took great pains in choosing the new labourers, and rejected many, not on the grounds that they seemed lazy or incompetent, but because they seemed too solemn or over-polite – that is, because they lacked the child-like simplicity required of the ‘noble savage’.¹⁷ Unfortunately, his aesthetic criteria for recruitment did not pay off, for in May there was a serious dispute among the men which was quelled only by sacking no fewer than thirty of them – a good third of the workforce. It was Leonard Woolley who later pointed out that despite Lawrence’s paternalistic fondness for the Arabs and their culture, he had no deep personal liking for the men of Jarablus-Carchemish. He had only two friends among them, Woolley said: the local overseer or Hoja, Hammoudi, and the water-boy Salim Ahmad, known by the nickname ‘Dahoum’.¹⁸

Hammoudi, a swashbuckler, proud of his Bedu roots, had lived wildly as a youth and had become embroiled in a number of blood-feuds. Declared an outlaw by the Turks, he had hidden out in the hills for five years, visiting his village only in disguise. An amnesty in 1908 had ended his exile, but he had found life tedious until Hogarth had come along and opened the Carchemish dig. On the site, his keenness had quickly brought him to notice, and Hogarth had earmarked him as overseer. Tall, lean, hatchet-faced, imposing in his long-sleeved astrakhan coat and purple headcloth, he never went to work without his cartridge belt and revolver, and could frequently be heard to declare that if only he had Ј100, he would buy a good horse and a gun and have done with the sedentary life. I’ll shoot a man or two,’ he would say, ‘and take to the hills again, and by God, I should be happier than living within walls like a cow!’¹⁹ If Lawrence’s admiration for Hammoudi was marred by the fact that he found him ‘a terrible bore conversationally’ and as sticky as a limpet, his affection for Dahoum was not similarly hampered. Dahoum first appears in a letter written in June 1911, as a fourteen-year-old donkey-boy who, as part of a trick being played on a Turkish gendarme, is forced to drink Seidlitz powder on pain of being beaten or ridiculed, and declares, in a good impersonation of Crusoe’s Man Friday, that the white man’s sorcery is ‘very dangerous for by it men are changed suddenly into the forms of mares or great apes’.²⁰ In a letter written a few days later, though, he emerges as an ‘interesting character’ who could read a little and was more intelligent than the ‘rank and file’, having expressed a wish to spend the money he was making at Carchemish on attending school in Aleppo, thus becoming the kind of ‘vulgar’ half-Europeanized Arab that Lawrence disliked. Indeed, Lawrence found himself firmly wedged in an ideological cleft stick over Dahoum, for while he declared grandiosely, ‘better a thousand times the Arab untouched’, he admitted that the life of the ‘Arab untouched’ was a ‘hideous grind’ fit only for the ‘low level of village minds’.²¹

Lawrence’s letters from this period show the soi-disant critic of the Renaissance and the ‘age of reason’ at his most self-contradictory: he criticized ‘foreigners who always come out here to teach whereas they had much better learn’,²² for instance, but concurrently declared with pride that he had taught Dahoum to use his reason as well as his instinct. He told his mother happily that there was as yet no ‘foreign influence’ in the district, neglecting the obvious powerful influence of two Englishmen: ‘… if only you had seen the ruination caused by French influence, & to a lesser degree by the American,’ he wrote, ‘you would never wish it extended.’²³ In the case of Dahoum, the colonial itch to improve gained the upper hand, for within a month he was writing to the American Mission School in Jebayyil for books with which to begin his ‘education’. These were to be ‘Arab’ not ‘foreign’, though Lawrence appeared to notice no inconsistency with his passionate defence of the ‘Arab untouched’ only a month before. For him it was only the ‘touch’ of other foreigners – particularly the French – which was likely to corrupt: he had no wish, he wrote, to do more for Dahoum than to give the boy a chance to improve himself, which, it might be argued, is precisely what the foreign missions thought they were doing. Lawrence was able to remove himself magically from the equation, because he believed that his influence was entirely benign. This view began with the perfection of the Englishman as its premise. The Arab could never aspire to be an Englishman, but had a duty to be ‘good of his type’ – to encourage this, Lawrence thought, the Englishman should learn his language, assimilate his customs and admire his traditions: ‘ [catch] the characteristics of the people about him,’ as Lawrence put it, ‘their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner.’²⁴ Once he had done so, he might ‘direct men secretly, guiding them as he would’.²⁵ Lawrence disdained other colonial styles, particularly that of the French, because, conversely, the Frenchman held himself up as an example to be imitated: rather than learn Arabic, he encouraged the Arab to learn French; rather than learn Arab customs and traditions, he encouraged the Arab to ape his own. The result of Lawrence’s style of colonialism would be a people with their own distinct cultural patterns, firmly but covertly under British dominion: the result of the French style, a ‘vulgarized’ and acculturated people who were unable to attain the heights of the European, but had abandoned all traditions of their own. Lawrence was desperate to avoid such a situation at all costs. He thought Dahoum ‘excellent material’ for improvement, and later taught him to take photographs on the site, but Woolley found his intelligence decidedly limited, and far outshone by his startling good looks. It was his physical perfection rather than his ability to reason that Lawrence celebrated when, two years later, he made a sculpture of Dahoum naked and set the finished sculpture on the house roof. He may have believed that it was Dahoum’s mind that interested him, but in fact he was attracted physically to the boy. Woolley noted obliquely that though Lawrence never admitted feeling affection for anyone, the affection for ‘certain people’ was ‘there and deeply felt’.²⁶ Quite simply, in Dahoum – Salim Ahmad – SA – Lawrence had found the one great love of his life.