Woolley and Lawrence conferred and decided they must confront the Governor, and on 17 March they set off by horse for Birejik, twenty-five miles to the north. They crossed the Euphrates by ferry, and, leaving their mounts at the khan, marched briskly up the main street to the government serail, standing in the shadows of a twelfth-century castle. Woolley sent in his card to the Governor’s office. There was no reply, and after a decent interval, he sent in his card again. Minutes ticked past, and no response came. This was intolerable treatment for respectable British subjects, Woolley felt, and, bursting with righteous indignation, he and Lawrence forced their way into the Governor’s office and sat down unceremoniously in front of his desk. As decorously as possible, Woolley inquired why work on the site had been prohibited. The Governor, a corpulent, sly-looking old man with a goatee beard, replied that the firman granting permission to excavate at the site was made out to a Mr D. G. Hogarth, and, since neither of the gentlemen in his presence appeared to bear that name, they could not be permitted to start work. Woolley protested that he had letters from Hogarth and the British Museum, but these letters were in English and the Governor waved them aside. He might be able to permit work to begin, he said, if the Englishmen were prepared to pay the salary of an unofficial commissaire. Both Woolley and Lawrence then realized that he was fishing for a large bribe. Just what happened next is uncertain. Woolley claimed that he leapt up, drew his pistol, held it to the Turk’s head, and threatened to shoot him there and then. It seems more likely, though, that he merely told him that work would proceed whether he liked it or not, upon which the Governor said he would send troops to prevent it.

‘I only hope that you will come at the head of your soldiers,’ Woolley said. ‘Then I shall have the pleasure of shooting you first!’⁶

‘So,’ said the Turk. ‘You would declare war on the Ottoman Empire!’

‘Not on the Ottoman Empire,’ Woolley replied coolly. ‘Only on the Governor of Birejik.’⁷

The Governor realized that his bluff had been called and caved in, declaring that he saw no reason why they could not start the following day, after all. This gunboat diplomacy had a great impact on Lawrence, for all his scorn of ‘ruling-race fantasies’, and he began to copy his new Director’s abrasive manner, just as he had tried to emulate Hogarth’s smoothness: ‘Woolley is really a most excellent person,’ he wrote to Edward Leeds. ‘You should have heard him last Sunday, regretting to the Governor of the Province that he was forced to shoot all soldiers who tried to interrupt our work at Carchemish and his sorrow that the first victim would have to be the little [Corporal].’⁸

They returned triumphantly to Carchemish, where their tiny army of workmen had manned the diggings with rifles and pistols to repel the Turks. On seeing the Englishmen riding backjaunty and unharmed, the Arabs cheered enthusiastically and let rip with salvoes of shots. Haj Wahid – whom Woolley had left in charge – put ten rounds from Lawrence’s own Mauser through the roof of his tent in glee. The racket drew a troop of German engineers, who rushed down to see what they thought was a battle, only to collide with a cavalcade of horsemen escorting the Governor in person. He had come only to deliver an official apology and to reassure everyone that work could commence, turning a blind eye to the building of the Expedition House, even though Lawrence had not yet received permission from Istanbul. No doubt inspired by his insouciance, Lawrence impudently wired to the capital again suggesting that it would be convenient to have permission to build the house before it had actually been completed.

The British had won the first round, but the Governor soon found a way to strike back. For the moment, though, they settled down to build their house, and Lawrence lifted a gloriously coloured and illustrated fifth-century Roman mosaic found in a field a mile away and installed it, piece by piece, as the living-room floor. The Expedition House became the ‘medieval hall’ he had dreamed about with Richards – a vast structure built round a courtyard, with no fewer than eleven rooms, including a dark-room. Lawrence practised the crafts he had learned as a youth to greater approval than he had received at home. He beat a bath and a firehood out of copper, built a table for the sitting-room, designed two armchairs which he had made for him in Aleppo, constructed basalt pillars and door mouldings, and eventually carved a mock-Hittite lintel over the door. He chose hangings and carpets, and crockery in the form of priceless Hittite pots and drinking-bowls, which he bought in neighbouring villages with Expedition funds, settling his conscience by resolving to let the Museum have anything which survived daily use. Descriptions of Lawrence at this time, indeed, portray him as something of a connoisseur – of carpets, Arab food, coffee, objets d’art, and other ‘beautiful things… to fill one’s house with’.⁹ Woolley said that the ‘evening Lawrence’ took on a very different aspect from the wild-haired youth of the day: ‘In the evening his hair was very carefully brushed,’ he wrote; ‘sitting in front of the winter fire reading… he would look with his sleek head and air of luxury extraordinarily unlike the Lawrence of the daytime.’¹⁰ The centrepiece of the sitting-room was a William Morris tapestry sent out from Oxford, which became an endless source of amusement to Lawrence. When European visitors arrived, they would invariably pass over the exquisite Arab textiles he had collected, and stand gaping at the Morris. When they inquired in what remote bazaar he had obtained the marvellous stuff, Lawrence would take great delight in replying, ‘Oh, you can buy it in Oxford Street for so many shillings a yard!’¹¹

Woolley and Lawrence kept open house, and frequently invited the German engineers to dinner in civilized fashion. But though Lawrence’s fears about the railway company carting away the ancient stones of Carchemish as railway ballast proved unfounded, he continued to harbour a secret grudge against them. He resented them ostensibly because ‘they did not know how to treat Arabs’, but actually because they had intruded on his private sphere, and formed an alternative centre of attraction for the natives. Lawrence’s skills lay in ‘handling’ the Arabs, a task he performed by harnessing the British tradition of colonial paternalism, nurtured over centuries. The Germans preferred more Teutonic methods of control, but the end was essentially the same. Although Lawrence genuinely tried to see things from an Arab point of view, and did so more successfully than most, his technique of’empathy’ remained a method of control. He believed the traditional Arabs morally superior to Europeans because they were ‘primitive’ and therefore ‘innocent’, but not intellectually so. The reality of his privileged position was stated frankly when he wrote: ‘Really this country, for the foreigner, is too glorious for words: one is really the baron in the feudal system.’¹² His sense of rivalry with the Germans was submerged, however, for to begin with they lived in symbiosis. The engineers needed ballast for their railway, and the British needed to get rid of certain heaps of stones they had dumped in the previous season, in order to dig beneath them. It was agreed that the Germans would carry away the British stones, and the British would thus get their dumps moved without cost to themselves. This suited everyone admirably, except the part-owner of the site, Hassan Agha, who felt distinctly hard done by. One morning he strode into the German camp and demanded payment for his stones. The engineers explained that they could not pay and that if he insisted they would go elsewhere for their ballast. Hassan Agha then fled to Birejik to complain to the Governor, who suddenly saw his chance of revenge.