The fever came and went, and though he managed to do some shopping in the bazaar with Haj Wahid, and even to quiz local dealers about his camera, stolen in 1909, he frequently felt himself falling into semi-faints. He sat down to dinner once in the Baron’s with his head spinning, and only regained his senses long enough to call the diner sitting opposite ‘a pig’, causing a tremendous uproar. The man was a. Greek Jew and his friends wanted Lawrence to apologize, while a group of beefy German railway engineers weighed in on Lawrence’s side, and the hotel manager ran around the tables wringing his hands. After three days Lawrence took a train to Damascus, and on the 12th, after another terrible night of fever, he sailed from Beirut. ‘Boat very full of people, all Syrians apparently,’ he managed to write in his diary. ‘Left Beirut 11am. All over.’³¹ He had survived the most fascinating and decisive year of his life by the skin of his teeth, but over it was not. All the way from Jarablus he had been nursing a letter from Hogarth saying that the second season at Carchemish was, after all, still under consideration – ‘The best news,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘that I have heard this long time.’³²

7. The Baron in the Feudal System

Carchemish and Egypt 1911-13

By November Lawrence was back in Jarablus, fully recovered from his illness. Sir Frederick Kenyon of the British Museum had been persuaded to re-open the dig at Carchemish, partly because of the pressure whipped up in the press, much of it by the influential Hogarth. A letter published in The Times in late July, entitled ‘Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia’, though, had also played its part, cleverly evoking British chauvinism by suggesting that the stones of ancient Carchemish were to be used as ballast for the German Berlin – Baghdad railway, which was about to reach the Euphrates. Although it was ascribed to an anonymous ‘Traveller’, this letter was actually the work of Lawrence: his first brilliant attempt to manipulate public opinion to his own advantage by using the establishment media. Kenyon had not only agreed to re-open the site, but had taken on Lawrence as a salaried assistant at 15s. a day. To replace Campbell-Thompson, who had decided to marry, he had appointed Lawrence’s old acquaintance, Leonard Woolley, as Director.

The German railway company was much in evidence on Lawrence’s return, constructing store-sheds and barracks for their workers in preparation for the wooden trestle bridge they planned to erect. Raff Fontana, the British Consul in Aleppo, had already told them in no uncertain terms that the Carchemish site was British property, and they were not to touch a single stone or blade of grass. The Germans, who had agreed to place the bridge slightly farther to the south, did not know that Fontana’s claim was false. Lawrence’s task in the district that November was to find out who the land actually did belong to, which entailed delving into the government archives at Birejik, with the help of Haj Wahid and a dragoman from the British Consulate in Aleppo. What they discovered was not encouraging. Out of the entire area of 160 denums of land, 120 belonged to a local landowner called Hassan Agha, while only forty had been purchased on behalf of the British Museum in 1879. Lawrence guessed that this situation would lead to problems in due course. His stay was a brief one, however, for he had made arrangements to work for a short period under Professor Flinders Petrie in Egypt, to improve his knowledge of archaeological field methods. He and Haj Wahid left Jarablus by coach on Christmas Day, 1911, in torrential rain. Crossing a footbridge over the Sajur, the coach slipped and overturned into the river, submerging one of the horses, pinning down another, and leaving the third thrashing about madly. Lawrence and the Haj, who had fortunately been walking ahead, plunged in to save their belongings, while the driver battled frantically to pull up the head of the drowning horse. Many of Lawrence’s things were carried off, and at one stage the Haj was almost washed away when he lost his footing and fell headlong into the torrent. It took two hours to extract the carriage in the freezing rain, and, as their lunch was well and truly soaked, they dined on a walnut each and an unlimited supply of muddy water. It was, said Lawrence, ‘the most memorable Christmas I’ve ever had’.¹

He joined Petrie at Kafr Ammar, fifty miles up the Nile from Cairo, in January 1912. Though he had dreamed of Egypt as a boy, he found the Professor’s style too ordered and systematic for his taste, and disliked the work, which consisted mainly of disinterring heat-mummified bodies. Petrie, whom Lawrence had met briefly as a schoolboy at the Ashmolean, was the most distinguished British archaeologist of his day. No patrician Oxford sophisticate of the Hogarth school, he was a self-trained excavator who had begun as a humble surveyor without any systematic education, and had used his great gifts to transform the practice of Egyptology. Before Petrie, Egyptologists had been little more than glorified treasure-hunters, obsessed with uncovering temples and carrying off vast statues for museums. Petrie had been the first to turn his attention to the despised minutiae of archaeology: the scribble on a potsherd, the fragment of an amulet, the remains of a ring. His methods of dating included the use of stylistic degeneration, which later became standard practice. At close quarters Lawrence found Petrie monumental ‘like a cathedral’, and he was amused when, after he had turned up on the site in a blazer and shorts, the Professor told him bluntly: ‘They don’t play cricket here.’ Lawrence, who was wearing the same dress he had worn at Carchemish, realized that shorts were considered infra dig in Egypt, though the reference to cricket made him chuckle: ‘I expect he meant football,’ he later wrote.² He felt a great sense of admiration for Petrie, but thought him dogmatic and opinionated. He also developed a strong distaste for the Egyptians, who, unlike the Arabs of Jarablus, would not play the colonial game of reassuring the Englishman that they were not diminished by his power. Lawrence found them ugly, dirty, dull and gloomy and ‘without the vigour’ of the Jarablus men. He could not talk to them with the same ‘delicious free intimacy’,³ for either they were surly, reminding him of his status, or else they ‘took liberties’, ignoring it. Neither of these styles was acceptable to Lawrence, for the Arab was supposed to treat the Englishman with a rough and ready frankness which gave the illusion of equality, without overstepping the mark into disrespect. In Egypt the gulf between the powerful and the powerless was clear to see: in Syria it was comfortably disguised. These prejudices, and the ache to be back with his friends at Carchemish, did nothing to stymie his energy, and Petrie was impressed enough to offer him a salary of Ј700 to supervise a dig at Bahrein or somewhere else in the Persian Gulf. Lawrence was tempted, but the call of Syria proved too strong, and by the end of February he was back at Carchemish.

Woolley was tied up in Egypt till March, and Lawrence had orders to proceed with the building of an Expedition House as a permanent base. As soon as he reached Jarablus, he recruited twenty-two men and started on the foundations, but the work was halted by the Corporal commanding the Turkish guard which had been posted to the site since Lawrence’s last visit. The Corporal inquired politely if he had permission to build a house. Lawrence answered that his sponsors had been given permission and that the local Governor was perfectly aware of it. ‘Quite so,’ said the Corporal, ‘but that Governor is gone.’⁴ There was no alternative but to suspend work while the Corporal wired Istanbul for permission, and a fortnight later Lawrence was still waiting for an answer. He travelled to Aleppo to meet Woolley, who arrived on 10 March expecting to find the house ready. He was irate when he discovered that work had not even begun, and whipped off a cable to Kenyon in London, demanding action. There was worse news to follow, however. When Lawrence and Woolley turned up at the site a few days later, and began enrolling workmen, they were told by the same Corporal that work was prohibited. Woolley dispatched a curt letter to the Governor asking him to curb the Corporal’s interference, and, confident that he would receive a prompt reply, proceeded to recruit 120 men. The Governor did not even deign to answer Woolley in person. Shortly, the Corporal arrived with a letter stating that the Governor did not know who Woolley was, and that work could under no circumstances commence. ‘This was a nasty shock,’ Woolley wrote; ‘… to put off the diggings now meant not only a waste of time, but would destroy the men’s confidence and respect – an important thing in a country none too civilised.’⁵