Ma’an lay only a short distance away across the Belqa hills, and Lawrence sent his baggage caravan on ahead as usual. He was annoyed to find on his arrival that the camels had been impounded by the police for grazing on public pasture, and would not be released until he paid a fine. Lawrence had learned the correct response to such problems at the hands of the firebrand Woolley, and he suddenly snatched a couple of the rifles which the policemen had piled before them and, with the weapons tucked under his arm, marched briskly towards the local Governor’s office. The policemen, too cowed to snatch them back, trotted close behind. He confronted the Governor, and demanded that the fine be waived in exchange for the rifles. The Governor was furious, but reluctantly agreed, instructing his men to free the camels, upon which Lawrence cocked a deliciously arrogant verbal snook, saying, ‘Please don’t trouble yourself. They left the town an hour and a half ago!’⁴ He waited at Ma an two days for a train, grumbling about the inefficiency of the Turkish railway engineers, and finally managed to travel to Damascus third class. He was not to see Ma an again for three years, and then it would be a distant vision from the desert, as he rode towards Aqaba at the head of a Hashemite force.

Lawrence was glad to be back at Carchemish, and took with him no yearning for the desert. He looked forward instead to the routine of the dig, wanting it to go on and on for years. At last the young man who had wished to spend his life as an artistic dilettante saw himself turning into a ‘professional’: in his letter to Vyvyan Richards at the end of the previous season he had confessed that ever since he had got to know the East, the idea of settling down at home had faded: ‘… gradually I slipped down,’ he wrote, ‘until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archaeologist. I fought very hard at Oxford… to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down now.’⁵ However, work could not begin until the end of March since Kenyon had neglected to renew the digging permit, and on the day Lawrence and Woolley arrived back from Aleppo with the permit, there was fighting in the railway camp.

It began when one of the labourers – a Kurd called Ali – discovered that his wage for a month’s hard labour was only five piastres. The workers were paid eight piastres a day by the German company, but the paymaster had built up a fine racket in docking wages for bread which the labourers did not eat, and for water, which came free from the Euphrates. ‘Ali protested that five piastres was not a proper reward for his labour, and when the German paymaster refused to listen, the Kurd dashed the money in his face. The paymaster’s Circassian steward promptly knocked him down, and when ‘Ali came up with a stone, the steward tried to shoot him. The other Kurds – 150 strong – broke ranks and began hurling stones at the German engineers’ office, smashing the windows. The Germans cocked their rifles, and opened up phlegmatically at everyone in sight, wounding five or six Arab workmen who were innocently engrossed in their labours thirty yards away. The Arabs downed tools, drew their pistols and fired back at the common enemy. The besieged engineers telephoned to their camp, and soon a solid phalanx of thirty armed Circassians, Turkish soldiers and fellow engineers swept across the bridge and began shooting from the near side. It was at this point that Lawrence and Woolley, who had run out of their house to find out what was happening, came under fire themselves. Lawrence saw a Circassian guard named Ahmad Zakkari step out about sixty yards away and take deliberate aim at Woolley. Fortunately, the man’s aim was bad, and the bullet simply richocheted around his feet. Lawrence sprinted across to the engineers’ office to tell the Germans that he and Woolley were not to be shot at. When he arrived back at the mound he was astonished to find that about 300 Kurds and Arabs had climbed it from the back, and were preparing to take the party on the bridge in a suicidal rush. Those who had revolvers were reloading them, and others had picked up crowbars and clubs. Lawrence and Woolley tried to push them back, even knocking some of them down, but soon the Circassian Ahmad Zakkari began shooting again, missing Lawrence but hitting a Kurdish boy he was talking to. This sent the Kurds into a mad frenzy, and it was only with tremendous force of will that the Englishmen managed to prevent them from opening fire. The crisis point had passed, however, and Lawrence and Woolley finally persuaded the men to carry their wounded to the Expedition House. About an hour later the crowd began to disperse into the village. One Kurd had been killed and about twenty men wounded by German fire.

When the British and German Consuls arrived the following day with a detachment of 250 Ottoman soldiers, the camp was calm. The railway company asked Woolley and Lawrence to negotiate a peace settlement on their behalf, through their friend Busrawi Agha of the Milli-Kurds. Lawrence suggested a payment of Ј80 blood money for the dead man and Ј40 compensation for the rest. He also recommended sacking the Circassians, replacing the paymaster and another engineer, and installing a dozen Kurds as observers on pay day. These proposals were accepted gladly by both sides, and Busrawi Agha travelled to Aleppo on the safe-conduct of the British Consul, Raff Fontana, to sign the accord there. Woolley and Lawrence had not, however, forgotten Ahmad Zakkari, the Circassian who had deliberately tried to murder them. The Ottoman authorities issued instructions for his arrest, but he had fled into the mountains, and was never found. A few weeks later the excavations closed down. Woolley and Lawrence had already drafted out part of their report on the Negev survey, The Wilderness of Zin, but some solid research on the background of exploration in the region was required, which could only be provided by libraries in England. Instead of wandering that summer, therefore, Lawrence chose to return to Oxford. He was never to see Dahoum or Carchemish again.

On 11 August, while Lawrence was at Polstead Road, he heard that Britain and Germany were at war. Young men everywhere – including his brothers and former classmates – clamoured to enlist in the forces, but Lawrence held back. Though he would later tell Robert Graves that he had tried to join an Officers’ Training Unit, and had been rejected owing to a glut of recruits, he subsequently denied this, confessing to Liddell Hart that he had never tried to enlist. Edward Leeds, with whom he frequently worked at the Ashmolean during late 1914, confirmed that he had not joined the recruiting frenzy: ‘My recollection is that he had no doubts about his duty,’ Leeds wrote later, ‘… he wanted to do his bit and fretted that he could not do it in the way he thought best … but he could bide his time and while waiting could calmly pursue other work and interests.’⁶ Lawrence clearly felt that he would be of most value in the Middle East, but Turkey had not yet entered the war on the German side. In anticipation, though, he applied to join the General Staff in Egypt: ‘The Egyptian people say they want me but not yet,’ he wrote to a friend that September, ‘and the War Office won’t accept me until the Egyptian WO has finished with me.’⁷ Lawrence was particularly vulnerable to tension, and the horrible suspicion that the Ottomans would not enter the war after all weighed on him heavily. If they did not, then the special skills he had acquired over the past five years would be useless to the war effort. There would then be no alternative but to join a combat unit and leave for France. The days of anxious waiting seemed to him interminable, and he wrote of ‘the horrible boredom of having nothing to do, & getting news about once a week and all the rumours and theories and anxieties of everybody all round you gets on all our nerves’.⁸ When The Wilderness of Zin was finished in October, he could stand the waiting no longer, and applied to his mentor David Hogarth to get him a war job. Hogarth was having trouble finding suitable war employment for himself, but managed to insinuate Lawrence into MO₄, the Geographical Department of Military Intelligence, whose chief, Colonel Coote Hedley, sat with him on the council of the Royal Geographical Society. Fortunately, Hedley had heard something of Lawrence’s ability through Stewart Newcombe, and the Palestine Exploration Fund, and took him on to help put together a large-scale map of Sinai, which existed in sixty-eight sheets in manuscript form. Hedley’s instructions to Lawrence were brusque: ‘You go down,’ he said, ‘and see what you can do with the damned thing!’⁹ The fact that Lawrence had seen only a small part of northern Sinai on the Negev survey did not deter him, and the same night he had produced a map six yards square, some of which was accurate, and some of which, he admitted, he invented. Hedley evidently succumbed to Lawrence’s apparent omniscience, for when, a few days later, Hogarth inquired if he had found the young man of any use, Hedley replied: ‘He’s running my entire department for me now.’¹⁰ He might have added that Lawrence was the department, since all the other map officers had been sent to France. Lawrence himself was still a civilian, however, and this fact became contentious when he was sent to take some maps to a senior officer, General Rawlinson, who, on seeing the ‘little pipsqueak’ in mufti, turned apoplectic and roared, ‘I want to speak to an officer!’¹¹ Hedley quickly put this right by recommending Lawrence for a commission without even a medical examination. He was soon appointed as a ‘Temporary second-lieutenant interpreter’, and he bought his uniform off the peg from the Army and Navy Stores the following day.