Despite his bruises, and the alarming knowledge of having been within a hair’s breadth of death, Lawrence made his way back to the site with some satisfaction. First, his disguise had worked, and he had been taken for a native peasant. Second, he had gained some exclusive news about the Kurds. Third, and perhaps most important for his own psyche, he had acquired, in his treatment at Khalfati, the elements of a fantasy upon which his masochism could feed. From boyhood, he had nursed a masochistic reverie about the army, a reverie acted out at the age of seventeen, when he had enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery. The idea of being a ‘deserter’ from the army appealed even more strongly to that fantasy: it represented resistance to an overwhelming authority, and provided a justification for the punishment which he enjoyed. He derived no pleasure from the actual beating he had received from the Turks at Khalfati, but the scene, relived and elaborated upon over and over again in his mind, would provide rich material for his imagination in years to come.

8. Peace in Mesopotamia Such as Has Not Been Seen for Generations

Britain and Syria 1913

The Bulgars were turned back at the gates of Stamboul and the threat to Aleppo evaporated, but Lawrence had had his first whiff of revolt, and found it intoxicating: ‘As for Turkey, down with the Turks,’ he wrote in April 1913. ‘… Their disappearance would mean a chance for the Arabs, who were at any rate once not incapable of good government.’¹ In June, when the excavations closed once again, he finally persuaded Dahoum to come home with him to Oxford. Previously the boy had been chary of accompanying him to a country of which he knew nothing: he had heard stories of Englishmen luring unsuspecting Arabs off to their homes and turning them into tinned meat. Even Hammoudi, the reformed bandit, for all his superior experience, was inclined to believe such tales. Seeing that Dahoum would not consent to come alone, Lawrence made the same offer to Hammoudi, and only a courageous leap of faith made the Hoja accept.

They stayed in the cottage at the bottom of the garden at 2 Polstead Road, and Dahoum’s beauty caused a stir among Lawrence’s acquaintances, particularly Charles Bell, who commissioned the painter Francis Dodd to make a portrait of him. Dahoum found that he enjoyed being the centre of attention, and once, when Dodd was interrupted at a critical moment by Lawrence’s brother Will and some friends, the boy turned to look at them in annoyance. This was just the expression of sultriness the artist had been looking for, and he captured it precisely, leaving Lawrence to rave over the portrait’s ‘absolute inspiration’.² While Hammoudi was pushed off onto Woolley some of the time, Dahoum stayed with Lawrence, lending a hand at the Ashmolean with the unpacking of antikas which had come from Carchemish. They were old friends, and it gave him some relief to discover what actually happened to them once they disappeared from the site.

The Arabs found Britain fascinating, but their views were disappointingly rational: ‘… unfortunately,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘they are too intelligent to be ridiculous about it.’³ To Dahoum it seemed a fat country, full of fat people, luxuriant, green, wet – a vast garden without villages but with peaceful, populous towns with towering buildings. He found the food rich and plentiful; he stumbled about London on the Underground, enjoyed riding a bicycle up and down Woodstock Road in his dishdasha, and once stood in a public lavatory stroking the white-glazed tiles and murmuring ‘beautiful, beautiful bricks’.⁴ He thought that Syria was a mere flea-bite compared with England, and that the Arabs were too few in comparison with the English ever to count in world politics. Lawrence approved this view: it had been partly to impress these men with the reality of British power and munificence – as opposed to the weakness and corruption of the Turks – that he had brought them here in the first place. As regards his own people, though, his purpose had been to shock: to enhance his reputation as an eccentric Englishman. He was fond of declaring that Dahoum had ‘Hittite blood’ – a statement which was entirely meaningless in any literal sense, but which virtually established the boy as the piиce de rйsistance of the Hittite collection from Carchemish – a living archaeological exhibit. People came from miles around to photograph the two Arabs in national dress as if they were exotic beasts, and even Woolley conspired in the ‘Hittite’ fantasy, by claiming that Dahoum’s face was reminiscent of some of those found on Hittite sculptures. If he had understood this claim, Dahoum would probably have considered it ludicrous: he was an Arab Fellah who lived on the banks of the Euphrates, and to whom the Hittites meant nothing. To Lawrence and his colleagues, though, he was the epitome of noble savagery: ‘The picture of Dahoum still comes back to me,’ Edward Leeds wrote; ‘… he seemed too spruce and fine for any menial task – a noble figure.’⁵ Neither Leeds nor Lawrence was able to see that they had fallen into the intellectual trap of confusing ‘nobility’ – a moral quality – with ‘beauty’ – an aesthetic one. This aesthetic, quasi-zoological objectivism was expressed unselfconsciously by Will Lawrence, who visited Ned in Syria later that year, and wrote of the Bedu that ‘the Hoja [Hammoudi] does as a type, but I have seen many better specimens’.⁶ Lawrence was sensitive to the charge of ‘exhibiting monkeys’, however, and sought to preserve his Arab friends’ dignity by refusing offers of money on their behalf from the numerous people he allowed to photograph them. Hammoudi, for one, was not amused. He did not believe that his dignity was impaired by being so photographed, and for him the practice of honouring a guest with a gift was commonplace. Leeds thought the Arabs ‘child-like’, and was hugely tickled to hear that when asked what he would like to take home with him, Hammoudi had chosen a water-tap, which he thought would always provide water, and a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign, which seemed to him to have some talismanic power to prevent people from straying where they were not wanted. Only one disquieting moment marred their stay. This was when they encountered an Egyptian called ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, who was an undergraduate at St John’s and a friend of Will’s. They claimed later that he had said to them, ‘Soon we will cut the throats of these dogs!’ – meaning the British – upon which the two Jarablus men had rushed back to Polstead Road and demanded a gun to shoot him with. Lawrence, who had ordered that they should be kept out of the way of any other Arabs, was irritated by this incident: he despised educated Arabs and he despised Egyptians – what could be worse than an educated Egyptian? Yet the story had a satisfying ring to it – proving the instinctive loyalty of the ‘noble’ Arab to the European, as opposed to the treachery of the Arab ‘corrupted’ by education. Lawrence wanted freedom for the Arabs, but for the Egyptians ‘freedom’ meant liberation not from Turkey, but from Britain, which had annexed their country in 1882.

When the two Arabs returned to Jarablus with Lawrence that August they boasted about their experiences ad nauseam to the other labourers, much to the annoyance of the Cypriot overseer Grigori, who was profoundly jealous. For his part, Lawrence became even more proprietorial towards Dahoum than before. Later in the year, when he was visited by a young army officer named Hubert Young – an excellent Arabic speaker who would later fight alongside Lawrence in the Arab Revolt – they sat down to sculpt two gargoyles for the roof of the house. While Young produced the head of a woman, Lawrence made a naked model of Dahoum. Woolley was shocked to find the figure on the roof when he returned. To him, it seemed an obvious declaration of Lawrence’s homosexual nature, and he wrote that it was regarded as such by the other Arabs, who were scandalized by the idea. Though Lawrence later delighted in representing homosexuality as a practice casually accepted by the Arabs, this was far from the truth, and very much a product of his wishful thinking. In the European tradition of Orientalism the East was a cultural dumping-ground for those traits European society despised in itself, and the stereotype of the lascivious Arab formed part of this tradition. In fact, homosexuality was neither accepted nor flaunted by the Arabs, and if practised at all was practised discreetly behind closed doors. Though Lawrence’s affair with Dahoum was most probably platonic, the naked statue seemed to proclaim otherwise, and much of the reputation that had accrued to him was lost by this heedless but compulsive act.