T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 451

To Hogarth Military Intelligence Office, War Office, Cairo. 20.4.15 There aren't going to be any nice schemes anytime, I believe, at least everything boils up all at once. One is told to be ready to start by the "Thursday" next week - and then it never becomes. the Thursday of this week. Finally the Med-Ext came out, beastly ill-prepared, with no knowledge of where it was going, or what it would meet, or what it was going to do. So we took pity on it, & made the rooms at the Intelligence Base, and its map base and so we'll be here till the end of it. Lloyd and Herbert went off with it, to help it, & Newbold & the young taking prize ships, Fort Said,controlling the French supplies. But I haven't any training as a Field Officer, and I don't know that I want to go fighting up to Con- stantinople. It would be too form, I think. The only place worth fighting is Asiatic Turkey & the fear of going there, for fear of hurting the feelings of our allies: The Canal is still holding out, and we are forgetting all about it. Turkey, if she is wise will raid it from time to time & creaks among the garrison their joints make a thousand ... & creaks so loudly in the joints that you hear them eight hours before they move. So it's quite easy to run down & chuck a bomb at it, & run away again without being caught. Everything is going to skin & today is 90° in the room, and one feels rather limp and bored. I bought you a seal the other day. It's probably the only one you'll get from as Kala year, and it is almost its only virtue. One wouldn't have bought it anywhere else, but in Cairo it was refreshing. For Leecs I am sending a medieval dagger pommel - or piece of hors-trapping, I bought it originally lately. Poor old Turkey is only hanging together.( People always talk of the splendid show she has made lately, but it really is too piti- ful for words. Everything about her is very very sick & almost I think it will be good to make an end of her, though it will be very inconvenient to ourselves. I only hope that Alleppo and Dam- ascus will escape a little the fate that has come upon Cairo. Anything fouler than the town buildings, or its beastly people can't be:- and I shouldn't have believed in them six months back. Carchemish is a village inhabited by the cleanest & most intelli- gent angels. I expected to find you on the staff of the Med Ex: however they hadn't anybody particular, except oneDedes (v. good at Turkish) and Colonel Hawker, who was deservedly in the Ottoman Gendarmerie: The expedition came out with two copies of some 1" maps of Europ- ean-Turkey as their sole supply. I hope you get me some of Pal- lers N.Syrian maps. Tell him the 1905 ones are rotten TEL.