Lawrence and Dahoum remained at Jebayyil for three and a half weeks, and would perhaps have stayed longer had he not received an urgent telegram from Haj Wahid, telling him that there was a crisis at Carchemish. The Germans, who had informed Lawrence that they would be suspending work during June, had built an extension railway line to the mound, and were preparing to plunder the stones Lawrence and Woolley had so painstakingly unearthed. Haj Wahid had protested to the Chief Engineer, Contzen, whom Lawrence described as an ‘ill-mannered bully’. The Chief told Haj Wahid that Woolley had given him permission, but the Haj knew the value of the stones, and would not budge. He told Contzen that he could not allow work to continue without further orders. Contzen sneered, but the Haj promptly sent a man to Birejik with a telegram for Lawrence in Jebayyil, and the following morning climbed the mound with a rifle and two revolvers and prepared to defend Carchemish. When the railway workforce of about 100 men approached with shovels and picks at the ready, he threatened to put a bullet through the first man to touch the walls of the mound. The workers had no heart for trouble. They simply went and sat down in the shade, until Contzen arrived and began shouting, whereupon the Haj threatened to shoot him, too.
This was the situation when Lawrence arrived in Aleppo. He sent Haj Wahid a telegram to let him know he was on his way, but the Haj replied that he had already resolved to kill Contzen, and in preparation had sent away his wife, downed an entire bottle of whisky, and loaded his rifle. Alarmed, Lawrence sought out Contzen’s superior in Aleppo – the Director of the railway – and burst in on him at a dinner party, saying that unless he wired Contzen to desist immediately, the engineer would be a dead man. The Director found this highly amusing. He quickly changed his mind, however, when Lawrence threatened to sign an affidavit in front of the British Consul swearing that the Director had not lifted a finger to defuse the situation. The Director put an electric trolley at Lawrence’s disposal, and he arrived at Carchemish the next day to find that Contzen’s men were about to pull apart its venerable walls. With the help of the local Minister of Public Instruction, Fuad Bey, he persuaded Contzen to retire and remove his rails. Contzen received a public upbraiding, and the Haj was warmly commended. Woolley returned at the end of September to find peace in the camp.
Work began again, and almost at once they were rewarded by the discovery of a Hittite door-frame with a perfect inscription. Woolley had ordered a light railway to be delivered from Europe, but it had been delayed, and a huge workforce of 200 men was required in consequence. Retaining them proved a headache, for Turkey was now at war in the Balkans and the Porte was recruiting every able-bodied man for the army. The Englishmen used their diplomatic immunity to protect their labourers, however, and gave sanctuary to those fleeing conscription in the Expedition House. Woolley forbade any policemen or soldiers from entering the dig. The ploy was effective, because while the railway camp was decimated, the Carchemish crew lost not a single man. This raised the prestige of the British enormously, and gave them a certain amount of protection against local insurgency, for minorities such as the Kurds and the Armenians were preparing to take advantage of the Balkan war to settle old scores with the Turks. In autumn 1912, Lawrence and Woolley visited Busrawi Agha, chief of the Milli-Kurds, a nomadic folk whose great leader, Ibrahim Pasha, was believed to have been poisoned by the CUP. Busrawi was talking openly of getting rid of the Turkish government once and for all, and the Englishmen learned to their dismay that the Milli-Kurds were planning to ransack Aleppo in revenge for the death of their paramount chief. As autumn turned to winter, news of Turkey’s defeats in Bulgaria and the advance of the Bulgarian army towards Istanbul was received with delight by the Kurds and Arabs. Ironically, perhaps, as long as the old Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II had remained in power as Khalif, these people had remained loyal to the Porte. With the coming of the CUP, though, the old loyalties had been sundered. It cannot have escaped Lawrence’s notice that they now regarded Hussain ibn ‘Ali, Emir of Mecca, as their religious chief. If the first faint clarion-call of revolt against the Turks sounded at this moment in Lawrence’s inner ear, it was drowned out by fears for the safety of the excavations and his countrymen in Aleppo, where, he heard, the Kurds had sent an agent to mark out the best houses for possible plunder. Woolley and Lawrence suspected that one of these might well be the British Consulate.
It was at this troubled time that Lawrence chose to try out his newly acquired skill of disguise in native dress. Though his Arabic was now fluent, he knew that he could never be taken for an Arab – he was too fair in appearance, and his mastery of grammar too poor for a native speaker. But northern Syria was inhabited by many non-Arab peoples, some of whom were fair-skinned and spoke Arabic imperfectly. Lawrence believed he might be able to pass himself off as a member of one of these minorities. Just how good was Lawrence’s Arabic? He later tended to be misleadingly modest about his mastery of the language, and even told Robert Graves that he did not know a word of classical (written) Arabic, which differed a great deal from the various spoken dialects. This was untrue: Lawrence had studied written Arabic with Fareedah al-Akle at Jebayyil in 1911, and at least once wrote part of a letter to her in the language. There is also extant a single Arabic letter signed by Lawrence and addressed to Sharif Hussain of Mecca, the language of which, while comprehensible, displays a mixture of dialects and styles. It has been authenticated by Dr Basil Hatim of the School of Arabic Translation and Interpreting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, as being the work of a non-native speaker, precluding the idea that Lawrence might have dictated it to a scribe. As for Lawrence’s colloquial Arabic, that too eventually became a hotch-potch of dialects, mainly Syrian and Hejazi. Lawrence had an excellent vocabulary, but his pronunciation was poor, his grammar ‘an adventure’ – as he himself admitted – and he spoke with a noticeable English accent. Alec Kirkbride, later one of his colleagues, who had grown up in Egypt and really did speak Arabic ‘like a native’, commented that Lawrence’s accent and pronunciation alone would have marked him as a foreigner. However, Lawrence was game to see whether he could pass as a native, and the opportunity arose near the end of November, when a villager arrived at the dig reporting that a sculpture of a woman riding two lions had been discovered near Khalfati, north of Birejik. Believing that the piece might well be Hittite, Lawrence dressed himself up in local costume and set off with Dahoum to investigate. They found the countryside seething with unrest. Thousands had been conscripted for the army, and whole villages had been depopulated. Kurdish tribesmen were being told by their Aghas to enlist in the Imperial army and then to desert as soon as they were given rifles. The whole district was awash with rumours of marauding bands. The Turkish police were trigger-happy and tense, constantly on the lookout, and no sooner had Lawrence and Dahoum entered Khalfati than they were arrested as suspected deserters by a military patrol. They were kicked downstairs into a filthy dungeon so harshly that Lawrence was badly bruised and Dahoum’s ankle sprained. In one version of the story, Lawrence suggested that he was beaten severely enough to be put in hospital. Whatever the case, they managed to escape by offering a bribe, and, abandoning the Hittite find, walked briskly back to wards Jarablus. Their way took them through the district of Nizib, where they found the Kurds excited, running about looking for a Christian to kill. Only Lawrence’s disguise saved him, and when they reached Nizib village they discovered what lay behind this bizarre behaviour. Two days earlier a horde of armed Kurds, under a chief called Derai, had looted the place and shot dead a Christian Armenian doctor whose fly-blown corpse still lay in the street. In Nizib and Birejik the native Christians were all in hiding.