When the two Arabs returned to Jarablus with Lawrence that August they boasted about their experiences ad nauseamto the other labourers, much to the annoyance of the Cypriot overseer Grigori, who was profoundly jealous. For his part, Lawrence became even more proprietorial towards Dahoum than before. Later in the year, when he was visited by a young army officer named Hubert Young – an excellent Arabic speaker who would later fight alongside Lawrence in the Arab Revolt – they sat down to sculpt two gargoyles for the roof of the house. While Young produced the head of a woman, Lawrence made a naked model of Dahoum. Woolley was shocked to find the figure on the roof when he returned. To him, it seemed an obvious declaration of Lawrence’s homosexual nature, and he wrote that it was regarded as such by the other Arabs, who were scandalized by the idea. Though Lawrence later delighted in representing homosexuality as a practice casually accepted by the Arabs, this was far from the truth, and very much a product of his wishful thinking. In the European tradition of Orientalism the East was a cultural dumping-ground for those traits European society despised in itself, and the stereotype of the lascivious Arab formed part of this tradition. In fact, homosexuality was neither accepted nor flaunted by the Arabs, and if practised at all was practised discreetly behind closed doors. Though Lawrence’s affair with Dahoum was most probably platonic, the naked statue seemed to proclaim otherwise, and much of the reputation that had accrued to him was lost by this heedless but compulsive act.
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.’ 7In Aleppo he had many friends – not only Arabs but also Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Circassians. His sense of noblesse obligewas 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.’ 8He 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 weredisputes 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 Isismagazine, 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.’ 9The 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.’ 10Dahoum 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.’ 11Lawrence’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’. 12Very soon, though, that idyll was to end, as a great wave of history finally crashed over the world, washing away all innocence.