Lawrence thought of north Syria now as his ‘own Arabic country’, and his proprietory attitude extended to all ‘his’ men. He wrote only half jokingly that he would like to become ‘The Sheikh’ of Jarablus, and when Will visited him in October 1913 he found that his brother was treated as ‘a great lord’: ‘Ned is known by everyone,’ he wrote, ‘and their enthusiasm over him is quite amusing.’⁷ In Aleppo he had many friends – not only Arabs but also Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Circassians. His sense of noblesse oblige was marked, to the extent that he thought of himself as the local doctor, treating everyday complaints, nursing his friends, dispatching sick villagers to the hospital in Aleppo, and even trying to make arrangements to vaccinate the entire village against cholera when an epidemic broke out in Aleppo in 1912. He also saw himself as an unofficial local magistrate, and was very proud when eighteen Kurdish chiefs turned up at his house to arrange a peace settlement between opposing factions which had been at feud for forty years: ‘… in our house they met on neutral ground,’ he wrote, ‘and fell upon each other’s necks (like a rugger scrum) and kissed. Since then there has been peace in northern Mesopotamia such as has not been seen for generations.’⁸ He was the defender of his people’s interests, once threatening to whip a German engineer who had had Dahoum beaten up, and reporting in delight that when the Carchemish dig opened in 1912, almost the entire German workforce abandoned the German camp for the British – even though the railway company paid higher wages. He took this as a personal compliment, but it was actually a triumph for benevolent paternalism: in the German camp the workers were beaten by aggressive Circassian henchmen if they misbehaved, were not allowed to talk to their overseers, and were given no baksheesh.

The atmosphere in the British camp might well have been jollier –though it is a matter of record that there were disputes with the workers – but Lawrence’s relationship with the Arabs remained essentially one of privilege. He enjoyed the power that being a European in the East gave him. His travels alone and on foot, sometimes in native dress, had enabled him to learn a great deal about the aspirations of the ordinary people, ‘to learn the masses’ as he put it, and his great sensitivity allowed him to see the world through their eyes more than most Europeans, but ultimately his loyalty lay with the ruling йlite, as his remarks about ‘the feudal system’ make clear. Lawrence claimed that he always found it difficult to deal with people, and loved to portray himself as an eccentric intellectual with his head among exotic objects and ideas. In fact, he emerged from his time at Carchemish highly skilled in man-management.

The most complete expression of Lawrence’s romantic view of Arabia and the Arabs at this stage appears in his essay for Isis magazine, The [Qasr] of Ibn Wardani (actually ibn Wardan), written in 1912. That summer he and Dahoum had visited the Qasr or castle, which had been built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The building was said to have been constructed with floral scents kneaded into the clay, so that each room had a different smell. Lawrence was led through the ruins by Dahoum, who, sniffing the air, announced: ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.’ Then, drawing him to an open window, he bade him smell the ‘sweetest scent of all’ – ‘the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert’ – which had no taste. ‘My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘to choose the things in which mankind had no share.’⁹ The Arabs, Lawrence was pointing out, regarded material civilization as a mere encumbrance which interfered with the real purpose of life. It was a sound philosophical point, and no doubt the idea went down well in pre-war Oxford, but it is as unlikely that Dahoum would have understood Lawrence’s romanticism, written from his high pedestal of material well-being, as it is that he actually said the words Lawrence puts into his mouth. The peasants of the Euphrates, struggling for survival, were not given to waxing poetic over the glories of a wind that was more enemy than friend. It is unlikely, too, that Dahoum, who wanted desperately to be able to read and write – presumably so that he could get a better job – would have turned his back on luxuries if they had been available to him. Only they were not, for Lawrence and Woolley forbade their men to use Western products, and would even send them home if they turned up in boots. The Arabs wanted the luxuries the Englishmen enjoyed: the Englishmen were prepared to force them to remain themselves, and thus maintain the romantic vision they admired. The story of Ibn Wardani purports to express the spiritual leanness of the Arabs: in fact it remains a peculiarly Western, peculiarly Orientalist view.

This is not to suggest that some of the Arabs did not like and admire Lawrence tremendously. Hammoudi said years later that from the very beginning Lawrence had been able to outride, outshoot, outwalk and outlast the best of them, and possessed a unique clarity of mind and purpose: ‘… while we would twist and turn with our object far away,’ he said, ‘he would smile and point out to us what we were after, and make us laugh, ashamed.’¹⁰ Dahoum apparently told Fareedah al-Akle in 1912 that there was nothing the Arabs could do which Lawrence could not do, and that he even excelled the Arabs in doing it: ‘he takes such an interest in us and cares for our welfare,’ Dahoum said. ‘We respect him and greatly admire his courage and bravery: we love him because he loves us and we would lay down our lives for him.’¹¹ Lawrence’s years at Carchemish were the happiest of his life, and by 1913, even the idea of printing with Vyvyan Richards had been dropped. It was, he wrote Richards, a place where one ate the lotus almost every day: ‘like a great sport with tangible results at the end of things’.¹² Very soon, though, that idyll was to end, as a great wave of history finally crashed over the world, washing away all innocence.

9. The Insurance People Have Nailed Me Down

Sinai, Syria, Britain 1914

At the end of December 1913, Woolley received a telegram from Sir Frederick Kenyon at the British Museum, requesting him and Lawrence to join an officer of the Royal Engineers for an archaeological survey of the Negev and northern Sinai under the aegis of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Its objectives were to trace an ancient caravan route from Palestine to Egypt and identify some of the sites associated with the forty years’ wandering of the Children of Israel. Lawrence guessed at once that these objectives were a red herring. The real purpose of the survey was military – an espionage mission inside Ottoman territory. Though Turkey had long been an ally of Britain, the far-sighted Lord Kitchener – British Agent in Egypt – suspected that in the event of a war with Germany the Ottomans would take the German side. Sinai protected the British Empire’s jugular – the Suez Canal – and beyond Sinai lay Palestine. It was, Kitchener thought, vital to the future of the canal that the area be thoroughly surveyed.

On 10 January they met the expedition leader, Captain Stewart Newcombe, at Beersheba. Newcombe was nonplussed to find them so young. ‘British Museum’ had evoked a vision of cobwebby old greybeards with fifteen tons of camp furniture, but instead Woolley and Lawrence travelled light and ‘looked about twenty-four and eighteen years of age respectively’.¹ Newcombe decided that his letters had been too deferential and that deference should stop immediately. He dispatched them into the desert with instructions to rendezvous at Qusayma – a desert post across the Egyptian border – in a few days’ time, and they promptly disappeared. When they failed to turn up on the appointed day, Newcombe grew worried. He sent a detachment of Egyptian Police Camel Corps looking for them, and the troopers returned having rounded up their camels, but having found no trace of the missing men. The result was wild telephoning back and forth across the border, and a squadron of Turkish border-guards was alerted on the Ottoman side. The local Bedu were suspected of having taken them prisoner and forty tribesmen were arrested as hostages. A day later, though, Woolley, Lawrence and Dahoum arrived at Qusayma, somewhat footsore, and were amazed to discover that the Camel Corps were hunting them. Lawrence explained that the camels had simply gone crazy and rushed off in the night. They had walked to Qadesh Barnea expecting to find the camels there, and had inadvertently taken a path through the hills which no camel could follow: this was why the Camel Corps had not found them: ‘It shows how easy it is,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘in an absolutely deserted country to defy a government.’² It was a lesson he would not forget. They remained at Qadesh Barnea – perhaps once the desert capital of the Children of Israel – for a few days and parted, Woolley for the Dead Sea, Lawrence for Aqaba where he was to meet Newcombe. Five days later he arrived at the head of the escarpment, and saw the Gulf of Aqaba for the first time.