While he lay in a half-stupor, the Hoja was fighting a battle with public opinion. His neighbours – almost all of whom had worked on the dig – advised him cold-bloodedly to throw Lawrence out, for if the Englishman were to die, they said, the ex-bandit Hammoudi would certainly be accused of poisoning him for his money, and arrested and imprisoned by the Government. The Hoja dug his heels in, however: to have turned Lawrence out would not only have violated the Muslim code of hospitality, but would also have been a considerable affront to an employer who might possibly offer him a job in the future. Lawrence must have overheard the heated arguments which ensued, for he gave Hammoudi a letter addressed to his father stating that if he should die, the Hoja was not to blame. For three days his life hung by a thread. Dahoum came to visit him each day. Then, on 1 August, there was a slight improvement, and Lawrence managed to drag himself painfully, with long rests, to the river for a much-needed wash. At four o’clock that afternoon the runner arrived back from Birejik without a carriage, saying that the local doctor and the Governor had refused to help. Lawrence was now in dire straits. He was faced with a five-day wait while he sent someone to wire for a carriage from Aleppo, or a ride on horseback to Membij, where there were carriages for hire. He decided to try for Membij, but it was a further two days before he felt strong enough. Just as he was about to set off, Hammoudi turned on him and refused the loan of his horse, without which, he knew, he had no chance of reaching the place. Furious at this sudden and inexplicable reversal in his host’s generosity, Lawrence teetered to another part of Jarablus with Dahoum’s help, and managed to hire a horse to take him to Tel Ahmar, where he might hitch a lift to Membij. One added problem was that he had no cash to pay for the horse, but the owner generously let him take it on trust on being told that he would change money in the bank at Tel Ahmar and send Dahoum back with both horse and cash. They travelled by night, under a fair moon, and reached the Euphrates by Tel Ahmar at dawn, to find their way cut off by the swollen Sajur. Dahoum plunged in, swam across, and brought a boat to ferry both Lawrence and horse to the far shore. There, Lawrence managed to change his money at the Syrian Bank, and sent Dahoum off happy with a metallik(half a crown) and his neighbour’s mount. He lay helpless in a hemp plantation until about mid-morning, when he managed to beg a ride on a wagon bound for Membij. There, after a long agony of bickering with the drivers, he hired a carriage for Aleppo, where he arrived on 5 August, and put himself gratefully to bed in the Baron’s Hotel.
The fever came and went, and though he managed to do some shopping in the bazaar with Haj Wahid, and even to quiz local dealers about his camera, stolen in 1909, he frequently felt himself falling into semi-faints. He sat down to dinner once in the Baron’s with his head spinning, and only regained his senses long enough to call the diner sitting opposite ‘a pig’, causing a tremendous uproar. The man was a. Greek Jew and his friends wanted Lawrence to apologize, while a group of beefy German railway engineers weighed in on Lawrence’s side, and the hotel manager ran around the tables wringing his hands. After three days Lawrence took a train to Damascus, and on the 12th, after another terrible night of fever, he sailed from Beirut. ‘Boat very full of people, all Syrians apparently,’ he managed to write in his diary. ‘Left Beirut 11am. All over.’ 31He had survived the most fascinating and decisive year of his life by the skin of his teeth, but over it was not. All the way from Jarablus he had been nursing a letter from Hogarth saying that the second season at Carchemish was, after all, still under consideration – ‘The best news,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘that I have heard this long time.’ 32
7. The Baron in the Feudal System
Carchemish and Egypt 1911-13
By November Lawrence was back in Jarablus, fully recovered from his illness. Sir Frederick Kenyon of the British Museum had been persuaded to re-open the dig at Carchemish, partly because of the pressure whipped up in the press, much of it by the influential Hogarth. A letter published in The Timesin late July, entitled ‘Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia’, though, had also played its part, cleverly evoking British chauvinism by suggesting that the stones of ancient Carchemish were to be used as ballast for the German Berlin – Baghdad railway, which was about to reach the Euphrates. Although it was ascribed to an anonymous ‘Traveller’, this letter was actually the work of Lawrence: his first brilliant attempt to manipulate public opinion to his own advantage by using the establishment media. Kenyon had not only agreed to re-open the site, but had taken on Lawrence as a salaried assistant at 15s. a day. To replace Campbell-Thompson, who had decided to marry, he had appointed Lawrence’s old acquaintance, Leonard Woolley, as Director.
The German railway company was much in evidence on Lawrence’s return, constructing store-sheds and barracks for their workers in preparation for the wooden trestle bridge they planned to erect. Raff Fontana, the British Consul in Aleppo, had already told them in no uncertain terms that the Carchemish site was British property, and they were not to touch a single stone or blade of grass. The Germans, who had agreed to place the bridge slightly farther to the south, did not know that Fontana’s claim was false. Lawrence’s task in the district that November was to find out who the land actually didbelong to, which entailed delving into the government archives at Birejik, with the help of Haj Wahid and a dragoman from the British Consulate in Aleppo. What they discovered was not encouraging. Out of the entire area of 160 denumsof land, 120 belonged to a local landowner called Hassan Agha, while only forty had been purchased on behalf of the British Museum in 1879. Lawrence guessed that this situation would lead to problems in due course. His stay was a brief one, however, for he had made arrangements to work for a short period under Professor Flinders Petrie in Egypt, to improve his knowledge of archaeological field methods. He and Haj Wahid left Jarablus by coach on Christmas Day, 1911, in torrential rain. Crossing a footbridge over the Sajur, the coach slipped and overturned into the river, submerging one of the horses, pinning down another, and leaving the third thrashing about madly. Lawrence and the Haj, who had fortunately been walking ahead, plunged in to save their belongings, while the driver battled frantically to pull up the head of the drowning horse. Many of Lawrence’s things were carried off, and at one stage the Haj was almost washed away when he lost his footing and fell headlong into the torrent. It took two hours to extract the carriage in the freezing rain, and, as their lunch was well and truly soaked, they dined on a walnut each and an unlimited supply of muddy water. It was, said Lawrence, ‘the most memorable Christmas I’ve ever had’. 1