Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  But her greatest interest was in Mesopotamia. In a note to Captain Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, she wrote: “I remember your putting your finger on the Bagdad corner of the map and saying that the ultimate success of the war depended on what we did there. You are one of the people who realised how serious are the questions we have to face.”

  Whatever happened, the British needed Iraq. Its huge grain supplies could feed the army, its proximity to oil could fuel the navy, and its location put it at the center of the land route to India. Mesopotamia, it was hoped, would be the place where the British could stave off the Turks by setting the Arabs against the Ottoman army. At the end of February 1916, Gertrude bade farewell to Domnul and Hardinge, and, having established a new line of communication between India and Egypt, with the Viceroy’s blessing she set sail for Basrah.

  From its position at the head of the Gulf, near the convergence of Iraq, Kuwait, Arabia and Persia, few places served as better listening posts, and few people were better equipped to listen than Gertrude. For the next few weeks, she was told by Hardinge, her mission was to gather information from the Arabs and to act as a liaison between British Intelligence in Cairo and India Intelligence in Delhi.

  She would be the eyes, the ears, the lips and the hands of Great Britain, watching, listening, talking to and stroking the Arabs of Iraq. It would be her job to convince the Arab tribes to cooperate with the British. But she would be working without an official position.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Remarkably Clever Woman

  The British troop transport steamed across the Indian Ocean, leaving behind the warm, muggy weather of Karachi, sailing north into the milder temperatures of the Persian Gulf. Past its ally of Kuwait it went, past the freshwater port where in 1899 the Sheikh had signed a protective treaty with the British; past Abadan, bowing to the refinery of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, whose oil was used mostly for British warships; past Muhammerah, salaaming the friendly sheikhdom to the east. The steamer had entered the yellow waters of the Shatt al Arab, the narrow river uniting the Tigris and the Euphrates and linking the Gulf to Basrah, the vital Mesopotamian port.

  From the rail of the ship Gertrude watched the shoreline as familiar groves of date-filled palm trees floated by, followed by Arab huts and mud-walled gardens graced with apricot trees. For thousands of years the river banks were home to people who had learned to harness the floods and enjoy the rice, barley, wheat, corn, dates and cotton yielded by the fruitful soil. “No doubt it was to the fertility of the country that earliest civilisation owed its existence,” Gertrude wrote when she first explored these shores. Close to here Adam and Eve had dwelled in the Garden of Eden, the Ark of Noah had been constructed, the Tower of Babel built, Babylonia had thrived and the Sumerians had invented the written form of language. By the medieval era, a string of conquerors had dispatched their soldiers to this land of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights: first the early Muslims, then Abbasids, then Seljuks ruled, only to be quashed in 1258 by the maniacal Mongol Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, who not only demolished Baghdad, murdered the intellectuals and destroyed the Islamic Caliph, but laid waste to the lands and ravaged the ancient system of irrigation. It was nearly three hundred years later, in 1534, that Suleiman the Magnificent brought Iraq into the Ottoman sphere.

  For Gertrude the key word of Iraq was “romance. Wherever you look for it you will find it. The great twin rivers, gloriously named, the huge Babylonian plains, now desert which were once a garden of the world; the story stretching back into the dark recesses of time—they shout romance.”

  On the morning of March 3, 1916, Gertrude stepped carefully onto the slip at Basrah, holding her long skirts with one hand, her hat with the other, dodging the black flies and the swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed around. Along the waterfront she caught sight of the odd Basrah houses made of yellow baked bricks, their latticed wooden balconies leaning out like busybodies over the mud streets mobbed with Arabs. She was glad to see it again, she scrawled in a note to her father soon after she arrived: “I feel as if I were in my own country once more, and welcome it, ugly though it is.” Still, she was concerned, unsure about her assignment and uneasy about what kind of welcome she would receive. Would they find a job for her or would they send her away at once? “Now it remains to be seen,” she wrote apprehensively.

  In Delhi and Cairo, the Great War had seemed far removed, but in Basrah the reverberations of battle still shook the city. Seized from the enemy in November 1914, the Turkish vilayet, the governmental province of thirty-three thousand local Arabs, was now a British Occupied Territory, thick with thousands of British soldiers and ruled by military decree. Sir Percy Cox, the Chief Political Officer—“a very big person,” Gertrude noted to her father—was on a visit to India Government headquarters in Bushire, but a warm greeting awaited her nonetheless. With few British wives in Basrah and almost no one to talk to, Lady Cox, whom Gertrude had met before, giddily showed her around their old Arab house and invited her to stay.

  When morning came, Gertrude set off, decked out in her petticoats, stockings, dress and hat, through the palm gardens and across the irrigation canals, to present herself at General Headquarters. There, in the large brick building set along a canal, she introduced herself to Colonel Beach, in charge of Military Intelligence, and renewed her friendship with Campbell Thompson, last seen in Carchemish and now Beach’s assistant in charge of decoding Turkish telegrams. They both were very welcoming, Gertrude reported to Florence, but the rest of the staff could hardly bother to hide their disgust.

  Hardinge had sent her to Basrah with a fuzzy task. She had no specific job or title, nor was she even on the military payroll. To the rigid male world of India Expeditionary Force D, Miss Bell, as she would be known, was a flighty meddler, not to be allowed to interfere. She was lectured on military rules, told that her mail would be strictly censored and was limited on where she could go and what she could do; the woman who had entered the tents of scores of desert sheikhs was ordered not to visit any native homes without a chaperone. Gertrude stamped out her cigarette and listened impatiently.

  She was to act as the informational link between Delhi and Cairo, contributing what she could on the Indian side for the Arab gazetteer, rousing support on the Egyptian side for an Arab revolt. But the Basrah military (attached to the Indian forces) had already shown their contempt for Cairo’s ideas. “I should like to see it announced that Mesopotamia was to be annexed to India as a colony for India and Indians,” Captain Arnold T. Wilson had written more than a year earlier, in November 1914, “that the Government of India would administer it, and gradually bring under cultivation its vast unpopulated desert plains, peopling them with martial races from the Punjab.” The headstrong Wilson, Sir Percy Cox’s second-in-command, was hardly ready to accept Miss Bell or any notions she carried with her from Cairo.

  At least Colonel Beach cooperated. With his help Gertrude was given access to the Intelligence files for her research on the gazetteer. But with so many military personnel in Basrah, there was hardly space to set up a desk. Instead, for the first few days she was handed the tribal material, names and places that had become so much a part of her life, and was shoehorned alongside Mr. Thompson in Colonel Beach’s bedroom—“a plan,” she noted dryly, “which is not very convenient either for us or for him.”

  At teatime she joined the Political Officers—among them the handsome H. St. John Philby and the tall, dark-eyed A. T. Wilson—immersing them at once in a pool of gossip. She filled them with fresh news from Cairo, and dished up tidbits of the negotiations between Sir Henry McMahon and the Sharif Hussein. “She had plenty to say for herself,” St. John Philby remarked in his memoirs.

  Later in the evening in her room at the Coxes’, Gertrude sent off a reassuring note. “I think it’s going to be exceedingly interesting,” she wrote cheerfully to her father. “I’m now looking for a servant—oh, for Fattuh!” she moaned. “It’s delicious weather but what Basrah
is like! Frogs and mud are the sum of my general impressions; muddy stagnant creeks and crowds of Arabs—but I like it!”

  For several days her routine remained the same, and then on March 8, Sir Percy Cox returned. She had met him before, in 1902 in India, and in 1909 at the home of their mutual friends the Ritchies, when Sir Percy had cautioned her strongly not to go to Arabia, not to attempt a visit to Ibn Rashid or Ibn Saud. Taking his advice, she had, instead, made the trip across the Syrian desert that led her to Ukhaidir. As disheartening as it had been to hear Cox then, it was only slightly more reassuring to see him now.

  Dressed in army officer’s uniform, but with the white tabs on his collar to mark him Political, Cox was fifty-one, four years older than Gertrude, tall, thin and distinguished-looking, with wavy silver hair, a firm jaw, large crooked nose and blue eyes that met hers directly. Known to be a cool, dispassionate soldier-statesman, he had been educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, had served in the region for nearly a decade as Agent for the Government of India and had won the respect of Arabs and British alike. He knew, of course, of Gertrude’s reputation, but the reticent Cox showed her none of the fatherly encouragement she had received from Chirol, Hogarth or even Hardinge. He could barely hide his suspicions of her Cairo colleagues, and McMahon’s promises to the Sharif Hussein seemed to him unwise, if not outrageous. Sending a woman to Basrah did little more to assure him. Yet a letter from the Viceroy Hardinge had advised him to take her seriously: “She is a remarkably clever woman with the brains of a man.”

  As Chief Political Officer, Sir Percy was to oversee the new administration in Mesopotamia. Good relations with the local tribes were of primary concern: the Arabs could not only ensure food and housing provisions for the British; they could help the army defeat the Turks. But the tribal sheikhs, many of whom owed their wealth to the Ottomans, were as likely to side with the Turks as with the Entente; if they did, the British could face disaster. Local tribes could block the British lines of communication, choke the oil pipelines, cut off food and water supplies and provide significant strength—tens of thousands of men and rifles—to the Ottoman army.

  There had already been a series of frustrating rejections. When one important sheikh was approached by an American intermediary for the British, he told the man, “The Turks have offered me one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars if we will join them.” But, he went on, “if the British give me two hundred thousand dollars we will go with them and refuse the Turks.” When the British officials heard his request, they turned it down, resenting the ransom. Shaking his head in disappointment, the Arab chief replied sadly, “I am sorry. I think the British are going to win, and I would like to be on the winning side.”

  When a meeting was requested with another chief, Ajaimi Sadun, who controlled four thousand Turkish rifles, the powerful Arab hemmed and hawed, fearing that his reputation would suffer if he abandoned the Turks for no cause; nevertheless, he allowed, it might be possible to find an excuse. He admitted he distrusted the Turks, but they had promised him all the Ottoman Crown lands in the Basrah vilayet. On the other hand, he said, if the British could assure him they would win, he would switch sides. But, then again, he added, the British Government was an unknown quantity of very uncertain stability. He was hesitant to decide. At last, he declared, he had made his decision: he would go with the Turks.

  Such discord only added to the British generals’ contempt for the local Arabs, many of whom raided army storehouses in Basrah, and did little to help the disdainful army win the tribes to their side. Cox believed the General Command was inept. For the past three months, IEF D had been struggling north toward Baghdad—without enough river transport, airplanes, doctors, medicine or food—into a quagmire of Ottoman territory, where, to make matters worse, as Gertrude noted later, the Arabs “backed the winner,” thinking it would be the Turks, “and hung like jackals round our troops, looted our camps, murdered our wounded, stripped our dead.” Cox had lost patience with the military leadership, particularly with the man in charge, General Lake. Thinking Gertrude might be a useful ally, Sir Percy was polite, promising to send on to her any Arabs he thought would be of interest.

  The day following her meeting with Cox, Gertrude lunched with the local command. General Lake, General Cowper, General Money and General Offley Shaw of the India Expeditionary Force stood stiffly, their khakis starched, their mustaches waxed to a point, as Gertrude entered the Officers’ Mess, and, keeping her head high and her back straight, lifting her skirts ever so slightly off the floor, took her place at the table. As she had done at the time of her Oxford exams, she sat tall and prickly as a long-stemmed rose and faced the four iron men.

  Across a sea of damask they raised their glasses, sipping the Rhine wine they had captured from local German cellars. From under his bushy brows, the gaunt-faced General Lake eyed her unruffled expression, and with exceeding politeness the officers fired away, asking her questions about the Arab Bureau. Like their colleagues in Delhi, they were opposed to a movement of Arab nationalism, opposed to an Arab revolt against the Turks, opposed to the Sharif of Mecca and opposed to giving up control of Mesopotamia. Most of all, they graciously omitted from their account, they were opposed to a woman messing in their business.

  Nevertheless, they needed her help. Facing a Turkish force of equal size, the British troops had to march through unmapped territory—desert, swamps and palm groves—as they progressed toward Baghdad. They had to be sure the Arabs would not ambush them, and for that they required local guides, men who could be trusted so that the natives would not attack. And they needed maps to know where they were going.

  Gertrude’s green eyes pierced the room, and she began to speak in a deep and knowledgeable tone that shattered their words into splints. There was much she could do to help the generals, she assured them: she knew how important it was to establish ties with the Arabs; she had heard how frustrating it had been. No one was on a friendlier basis with the sheikhs and notables than Gertrude: not only did she know many of them by name; she knew their sons and their brothers, had sat in their tents and their salons, had drunk their coffee and shared their bread. With her help, the Arab chiefs might be persuaded to lend their support; with her help, the troops might have enough supplies for housing and food; and with her help, the maps could be drawn so that the army could find its way to Baghdad.

  Their response arrived with the pudding. Later that afternoon, Gertrude wrote to her mother, “They moved me and my maps and books on to a splendid great verandah with a cool room behind it where I sit and work all day long.” With great enthusiasm and a dash of naïveté she noted, “Everyone is being amazingly kind.”

  The war had put great distance between Gertrude and home. She longed to know how her brother Maurice, on sick leave from the European front, was faring, but mail from England took more than a month to reach Basrah, and with so many ships sunk by the enemy, letters often went down at sea. “One feels—and indeed is—awfully far away, and the echoes of war in France which must to you sound so deafening are nearly lost here under those of Mesopotamia,” she wrote to her father.

  There was little local news she could discuss in her letters because of the censors. She made small references to Kut al Amara, the peninsula town where, as a result of numerous command mistakes, several thousand British forces, struggling through swamps and muck as they inched their way from Basrah toward Baghdad, had been caught under siege. Forced to flee from a battle at Ctesiphon, only forty miles from their goal, they had retreated to Kut. There, in the muddy town on the Tigris, they were besieged, trapped without enough food, medicine or ammunition to fight their way out. For three months the soldiers—many wounded, others suffering from dysentery and malaria—had waited desperately for reinforcements. But British troops on their way to help were blockaded by a Turkish army composed of Arabs ten times their number. Again and again, boatloads of British soldiers were sent up the river to relieve the force; again and again, their bodies were paddled ba
ck by wooden barge. Still, the air was electric with suggestions that the Turks might be giving in.

  In reply to questions from her mother, she said she had no idea how long she was going to stay or where she would go next or what she would be doing. It seemed, though, that she might be in Mesopotamia much longer than she had planned. The thought of the steamy summer two months ahead prompted a flood of requests: she needed hot weather clothes that would be easy to wash; petticoats, crêpe de Chine shirts and stockings; an evening gown in cream lace that touched the floor, narrow black velvet ribbon to wear around her neck, a pair of tussore knickerbockers and two pairs of thin stays. Finally, a pair of eyeglasses and a pair of spectacles, stronger than the ones she had now, since all the mapmaking was straining her eyes.

  Predictably, the spring rains came, flooding the city, causing the roads to excrete slime. On a morning drenched from cloud bursts, Gertrude walked from the Coxes’ house to Headquarters, hurdling like an athlete over gulfs of mud, “tight rope dancing” on fallen palm trees, certain at any moment she might slip and sink into a pool of muck.

  Word arrived that Colonel Beach wished to see her. He had some information, he said; it looked as if the British forces up north would soon be moving forward toward Baghdad, and if so, they would immediately encounter the local tribes. The colonel often called on Gertrude to meet with local Arabs and to help with the mapping and charting the tribes. More than fifty groups inhabited the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, including the rice-growing Abu Muhammad; the nomadic Bani Lam, with their fine-bred herds of horses and camels; the troublesome Bani Rabiah of Kut; the two hundred thousand people, including the Sadun, who made up the loose confederation of the Muntafik; the two hundred and fifty thousand Anazeh, Bedouin who roamed the Syrian desert from Aleppo all the way to Central Arabia; and on the Euphrates, above Ramadi, the great shepherd tribe of the Dulaim. Tribal organization remained as it had been for a dozen generations, since nomad tribes had wandered north from Arabia; the power of the sheikhs was deeply rooted, tribal laws and customs held sway and tribal blood feuds provided the excuse for constant and bitter revenge.