After breakfast, Lawrence and Thompson would stroll down to the site, where the men had begun work at about 5.30 a.m. For the first few weeks they excavated at the base of the stairway, which had not been disturbed by the previous diggers, and where they believed the royal palace to have been. Lawrence found the actual digging ‘tremendous fun’. The men generally laboured in teams of four – each team consisting of a pickman, a shoveller and two basketmen, whose job it was to carry the spoil to the river and dump it there. All the men received the same pay, but most wanted the job of pickman, since it was the easiest and the most likely to reveal antikasor artefacts. This was a great incentive, for baksheesh was awarded to the man who discovered an antika,and the importance of the find was reflected in the amount. The finds actually became more valuable as they neared the river, so that even the basketmen stayed alert for what the pickman and shoveller might have missed. Later, Lawrence displayed his masterly grasp of psychology by introducing a system by which the overseer would fire pistol-shots to announce the finds, the number of shots varying according to the object’s importance: a fragment of sculpture might be worth one shot, for instance, while an entire sculpture was valued at seven or eight. The award of pistol-shots came to be regarded as a greater honour than the baksheesh which went with it, for baksheesh was, after all, only money. The finders of antikaswould argue hotly with the overseers as to how many shots their find was worth, and even come to blows over it. Grown men who had gone days without a single shot fired in their honour were seen to break down in tears. Lawrence soon demonstrated that his forte lay in motivating the workers, and he would often turn the work into a game, pitting pickmen against shovellers and basketmen until the whole team, including himself, was yelling and running about, and a whole day’s work might be accomplished in an hour.
From about eight in the morning, streams of women and children wearing shimmering red and blue colours could be seen pouring out of the villages on the water-plains, carrying piles of fresh bread wrapped in checked handkerchiefs and balancing pots of sour milk on their heads. This was the time of day Lawrence relished: the fierce heat had yet to rise, and the men were still fresh enough to chat, sing and play shepherd’s pipes. Though predominantly Arab in culture, these Euphrates villagers were a mйlange of peoples – Kurd, Circassian, Arab and Turkoman – and they sometimes spoke three or four languages, often compounding sentences from all at once. Lawrence, who had been studying written Arabic with Fareedah al-Akle in Jebayyil prior to meeting Hogarth, found their dialect Vile’ and almost unintelligible. While the men were working, Lawrence and Thompson – who also spoke Arabic – would busy themselves in measuring depths, taking squeezes, copying inscriptions, making sketches and taking photographs. Soon, though, they realized that there was not enough work for the two of them, and decided to work shifts, alternating with periods at the house going over the finds. The men finished work at five, and Lawrence would retire to the house to write up the daily log, compile object-lists, and examine the pottery found during the day, which was his particular charge. His superb memory served him well, and he was able to piece together potsherds almost instantly even when they had been found months apart. He could recall the intricate details of the stratum in which an object had been discovered, even if it was not he himself who had found it. Between 7 and 7.30 p.m. the Haj would produce dinner – a rather limited affair until Hogarth hit on the idea of buying bread from the Turks. Lawrence and his colleagues almost came to grief once when the cook emptied an entire pot of curry powder into the pilaff: ‘It was,’ said Lawrence, ‘like eating peppered flames, and the other two are complaining about their livers!’ 9
His reference to ‘the other two’ is significant because despite his contentment at Carchemish, it is clear that even here he adopted his self-fashioned mantle of oddness. The continual emphasis in his letters on his uniqueness, his distinction, his greater hardiness, was actually the product of a deep dissatisfaction with himself. While Hogarth’s teeth refused to eat the leathery bread, for instance, and Thompson could only just get through it, Lawrence ‘flourished’. Lawrence was ‘the only one of the three’ who got a good night’s sleep, due to a special power he had to sleep through anything (though at home he had asked for his cottage to be built because he was unable to stand the noise). It was Lawrence who hung doors, windows and shelves in the house, because he was the ‘handiest’, and he, apparently, who solved all the practical problems of the dig, with his superior facility for ‘fixing and improving things’. This aura of superiority was, of course, assumed – a shell protecting inner frailty – yet some found it disturbing. Ernest Altounyan, who visited Carchemish that year, was one of them. The son of the Armenian doctor who ran Aleppo’s hospital, and his Irish wife, Altounyan was a medical undergraduate on vacation from Cambridge when he met Lawrence, and perceived that he was a young man who has ‘spun his cocoon but had not yet the assurance which enabled the full-grown man to leave it when required’. 10Altounyan found the ‘frail, pallid, silent youth’ snobbish and impossible: ‘The shut-up Oxford face,’ he wrote, ‘the downcast eyes, the soft reluctant speech, courteous, impersonal, were impressive, disturbing, disagreeable.’ He thought Lawrence a poseur and commented that his power would have been more constructive had he only ‘acknowledged less grudgingly the possibilities of others’. 11Lawrence was afraid of Altounyan, who was a fluent Arabic-speaker, half-native, half-European, and an educated man like himself, who could see through all his colonial poses and deceptions. He was unable to acknowledge Altounyan’s possibilities, simply because deep inside he felt that all men were more ‘men’ than himself.
Lawrence retained a certain awe of Hogarth, thinking him ‘a splendid man’ for his vast experience of the East, his ability to converse with equal intelligibility in six languages, and his encyclopedic knowledge. He continually tried to impress him, once, for instance, waking him up on their train journey to Aleppo to see the village of Harosheth, the setting of Deborah’s Ode in the Old Testament. Fortunately, Hogarth shared his admiration for the poem, and was delighted: ‘That went down very well,’ Lawrence wrote home with satisfaction. 12For his part, Hogarth was suitably convinced of Lawrence’s potential as an antiquarian, and thought him technically a better archaeologist than Thompson. Though he wrote later that Lawrence was an ‘admirable adjutant’, he doubted his ability to drive the work forward. That Lawrence had a certain devil-may-care attitude was noticed also by Leonard Woolley, who was to take Hogarth’s place at Carchemish the following season. Woolley wrote that Lawrence was curiously erratic where work was concerned: if he was interested he could be remarkably astute, but if he disliked an object or thought it unimportant he would ignore it. He got on very well with the men, Woolley said, to such an extent that he would sometimes return from another part of the dig to find Lawrence sitting in conference with the Arabs discussing some question of folklore or point of local dialect. 13Such a fault could not have been levelled at Campbell-Thompson, who had an insular contempt for the natives which enabled him to drive them unhesitatingly – a quality which Hogarth, whose nickname among the Arabs was ‘The Angel of Death’, appreciated. Lawrence wrote that Thompson was ‘pleasant’ and ‘very good fun’ and admired his knowledge of Semitic languages. According to Hogarth they got on excellently, but this was Lawrence’s charm working for Hogarth’s benefit, for actually he felt a sense of competition with the older man, inwardly mocking his overt displays of physical strength, and the collection of rifles, pistols, swords and fencing equipment he had brought with him to the site.