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.’ 6Lawrence 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.’ 7Lawrence 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’. 8When The Wilderness of Zinwas 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 MO 4, 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!’ 9The 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.’ 10He might have added that Lawrence wasthe 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!’ 11Hedley 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.
In February 1914, while Lawrence and Woolley had been wandering about the Negev, Sharif ‘Abdallah, second son of Hussain, Emir of Mecca, had arrived in Cairo for a visit to the Egyptian Sultan. He was no longer the inexperienced youth who had landed from the Tantaat Jeddah in 1908, but had spent his adolescent years hardening himself to the saddle, riding with Hussain’s Bedu levies, and, with his brothers ‘Ali and Feisal, carrying out punitive raids against recalcitrant tribes, and fighting in the ‘Assir in the name of the Turks. Highly astute, popular among the Arabs, Sharif ‘Abdallah was reckoned by many to be the true power in the Hejaz. Now, he was on his way to Istanbul to complain to officials of the Ottoman Government, who had just announced a new system of local administration. Known as the Vilayet system, it was intended to cut out traditional Arab leaders like his father, Hussain, who since 1908 had steadily been gathering power among the Bedu tribes. To install this new system, the Porte was determined to extend the Hejaz railway from its present terminus at Medina to the Emir’s seat at Mecca, and a hardline governor named Vehib Bey had already been dispatched from Istanbul with seven battalions of infantry and a regiment of artillery to help carry the job out. If the railway was completed, ‘Abdallah knew, it would mean the end of his family’s power in the Hejaz for ever.
The Hejaz railway had reached Medina in 1908, the year in which the Hashemites had returned to Mecca, but at that time Sharif Hussain had preferred to travel by ship, partly because Medina had then been under siege by certain Bedu tribes. It was, nevertheless, a triumph of Ottoman imperial vision and German precision engineering, crossing 800 miles of deserts and arid hills which for millennia had lain silent but for the tread of men and pack animals – a steel road, symmetrical, shining and alien. Designed by Meissner Pasha – a German engineer of insuperable drive and genius – it had been laid by a force of almost 6,000 Turkish soldiers, whose blood stained almost every mile of the track. With dogged fortitude, the Turks had swung their hammers, advancing slowly, suffering heat, thirst, hunger, flies and disease. There were great natural problems to contend with – vast wadis which had to be spanned by twenty-arched bridges: sandstone hogsbacks which had to be cut and blasted through. The track was in need of constant maintenance: the ballast of the embankments would subside and leave holes under the rails; drifting sand would block the culverts; floodwaters would fill them with detritus and wash the banks away; Bedu raiders would damage the tracks. The labourers worked in troops of twenty to fifty together, always armed, always with sentries posted in high places to warn them of the approach of Bedu parties. No Bedui was permitted to come near a station without permission upon threat of being shot down, and in the Hejaz almost every station was protected by a stone fort, each with its underground water-cistern, equipped with loopholes and steel shutters, and entangled by barbed wire. If the sentries spotted raiders approaching, they would give a signal to the working parties, who would jump aboard their trolleys and rush to the station. Sometimes they were attacked by the marauders before they could reach safety and cut down man by man: frequently they were obliged to hold out for several days. The Bedu were uncontrollable. They trusted no one and were constantly in arms against the government and against each other, yet they were united in their hatred for the railway, which had reduced the carrying trade, and enabled the Turks to strengthen their control in the Hejaz.