Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  A beastly, steamy heat permeated Basrah. Gertrude sat at her desk, enclosed in her room, the doors and windows tightly shuttered to ward off the sun, the blades of the electric fan spinning. It was three years since she had seen the daffodils coming up in springtime at Rounton. “Oh I wonder how my dear family is and wish for news,” she wrote with an almost audible sigh. “One falls into a kind of coma when one is so far away and wakes up with a jump at intervals.”

  It was not the heat that bothered her, she assured them, but her clothes. Unlike her fellow officers, who could requisition a clean new uniform at any time, she had no one to make her new dresses. Her things were beginning to fall apart. “One wears almost nothing, fortunately, still it’s all the more essential that that nothing should not be in holes.” And she was still without friends, as neither Aubrey nor Lawrence had returned: “They go up river and disappear. I long for someone I know to come down so that I may hear what is happening for we get very little news.”

  Word of the siege at Kut had already reached England, and in the mail from home her father had included an article from the Economist, blaming the Government of India for the military disaster. Gertrude may not have known that while the taking of Basrah was carried out upon orders from London, the premature thrust toward Baghdad had been General Townshend’s initiative, agreed to only reluctantly by London. The Economist article triggered a furious response. Aware that Hugh would pass on her letter to influential friends at Whitehall, she took out pen and paper and, noting that the India Government was not alone in deserving blame for the military disaster, she answered angrily:

  Politically, too, we rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. We treated Mesop. as if it were an isolated unit, instead of which it is part of Arabia, its politics indissolubly connected with the great and far reaching Arab question, which presents, indeed, different facets as you regard it from different aspects, and is yet always one and the same indivisible block. The coordinating of Arabian politics and the creation of an Arabian policy should have been done at home—it could only have been done successfully at home. There was no one to do it, no one who had ever thought of it, and it was left to our people in Egypt to thrash out, in the face of strenuous opposition from India and London, some sort of wide scheme, which will, I am persuaded, ultimately form the basis of our relations with the Arabs. And up to this moment, the battle against the ignorance and indifference of the people at home is waging—and is not yet won. The Milton sonnet is so often in my mind—there’s no one to lead. Swollen with wind and the rank mists we draw—

  Well that’s enough of politics. But when people talk of our muddling through it throws me into a passion. Muddle through! why yes, so we do—wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.

  More than twenty-three thousand British relief soldiers had been killed by the time (two days before she composed her letter) that General Townshend met with the head of the Turkish forces and proposed that Lawrence and Herbert be allowed to speak with General Khalil. The offer was denounced with a flat refusal. Instead, the Turks insisted, the British soldiers must immediately abandon Kut and surrender. It was on April 29, 1916, that the radio operator at Kut sent his final message of goodbye: more than thirteen thousand British and Indian troops were taken prisoner and sent on a march to almost certain death. The fall of Kut was one of the worst defeats in British history.

  Unaware of the surrender, Lawrence, Herbert and Colonel Beach left their trenches and, holding a white flag, edged their way a couple of hundred yards toward the Turkish side. An enemy soldier was sent to find out what they wanted, and led them, blindfolded, to General Khalil. Hearing that their countrymen had surrendered, the surprised threesome tried for an exchange of prisoners, but an agreement had already been made to trade the British sick and wounded for Turkish prisoners of war. Except for a pleasant Turkish dinner, the whole event was a fiasco. Newspapers around the world reported the humiliating story of the failed attempt at bribery, and by May 8, Lawrence and Beach were back in Basrah.

  Outraged by what he had seen at Kut, Lawrence sent Cairo a scathing report. Iraq was a “blunderland,” he announced, except for Sir Percy Cox, who was “delightful,” and Miss Bell, who he thought was first rate. But with Gertrude needed in Cairo, he had to find someone to take over her job as Basrah representative of the Arab Bureau. He approached Sir Percy Cox, but the Chief Political Officer handed the matter over to Colonel Beach.

  Lawrence persisted, explaining to Cox that the Arab Bureau was a “Foreign Office affair” and that its representative must be “intimate with the work of the political side.” For the present, he and Cox agreed, Miss Bell would continue to do the tribal and geographical work while they searched for a successor. But it would take at least two people to replace her. “I have a feeling that no one person will be able to supply us with all we want,” Lawrence wrote. Only she had the female charm to extract what was needed: “I think Miss Bell, by her sex and energy and lack of self-consciousness, is peculiarly likely to persuade Political Officers to send her what she asks for.”

  Nevertheless, competition for the job was growing. George Lloyd had been sent out from Cairo, and India had sent out their own choice. But the former spoke no Arabic, and the latter had never before been in the East. On May 14 Gertrude wrote to Hogarth, emphasizing the importance of being fluent in Arabic. “Even the information which comes to us from the Political Office,” she said, required an understanding of the language; “clan names, peoples’ names, tribe names, spelt with so many variations that you are put to it to find out that two almost wholly different words are really the same. And the actual intercourse with the natives (of whom I now see a good deal) necessitates Arabic.”

  As difficult as it was, Gertrude was eager to stay in Iraq.

  A great deal of work needed to be done in Basrah. Ibn Rashid still had to be “roped in” and neutralized, and when several of his men came into the office to meet with her, Gertrude gave them a long letter for the Emir. She was now assigned all the liaison work between Basrah and Cairo and hoped that it would bring her in closer contact with Percy Cox. “I like him very much,” she told her father; “he is a big man and it will be a great pleasure to work with him.”

  Her reports had also been appearing in the Arab Bulletin, the secret publication on Middle East personalities and politics initiated by the Arab Bureau in Cairo and circulated exclusively to the highest Intelligence officials. Gertrude’s information, she told her father, came from natives as well as from the refugees now “tumbling in from Baghdad, fleeing from Turkish oppression.” Many of them she knew; and if she didn’t know them directly, she knew their friends. And since almost all of them had heard of her, she met them “on equal terms.” It was great fun, she wrote. “It’s also very valuable sometimes, the lead they give you into the recesses of Oriental opinions.”

  One analysis she wrote contained a cautious view of the future: “Men living in tents, or in reed huts almost as nomadic as the tent itself, men who have never known any control but the empty fiction of Turkish authority … men who have the tradition of a personal independence … ignorant of a world which lay outside their swamps and pasturages, and … indifferent to its interests and to the opportunities it offers, will not in a day fall into step with European ambitions, nor welcome European methods. Nor can they be hastened. Whether that which we have to teach them will add to the sum of their happiness, or whether the learning or inevitable lessons will bring them the proverbial attitude of wisdom, that schooling must, if it is to be valuable, be long and slow.”

  Not until the summertime, after the end of the siege at Kut, could Gertrude travel along the Euphrates, but with information to be gathered, she ignored as best she could the sun beating down on her back and the wind scorching her face, and sailed by steamer through the marshes with her friend General MacMunn. Past the man-made reed islands—villages rising and falling in the river floods—they ro
de to Nasariyah, where some of the tribesmen had been persuaded to serve as agents for the British. For several days in early June, she explored the town, working on her reports, filling in missing tribal data, visiting the homes of notables in the evenings and gathering Intelligence material on the Turks.

  At a stop on the way back to Basrah, Gertrude met Captain Dickson, the Revenue officer at Suq al Shuyukh. To support the cost of their occupation, the British, like the Turks, taxed the local tribes, using the sheikhs to collect the money and giving them a percentage as a prize. Like all his colleagues, Dickson was challenged continually by the cleverness of the local Arabs. He liked to tell the story of one old sheikh from whom he tried to collect revenues. Since there were no records of how much money their predecessors, the Turks, had received, Dickson asked the first sheikh he encountered how many date palm trees he had been taxed on by the Ottoman administration. “By God, O Dickson, I know not,” the sheikh answered.

  “Rot,” Dickson said, “of course you know quite well. Now how many trees did you pay on in 1914?”

  “By your head, mine eyes, I know not,” the sheikh responded. “Write fifteen hundred!” he commanded.

  Dickson jotted down that number in his book and collected from the man the appropriate tax. Several days later an informer showed Dickson an old Turkish tax receipt stating that the sheikh owned five thousand trees. Dickson ordered the sheikh to appear at his office and asked him to explain.

  “Five thousand, sayest thou, my dear?” asked the sheikh. “By God, it is very strange!” Then, with a generous sweep of his hand, he ordered Dickson, “Y’Allah! Write down six thousand, my friend. Let us not quarrel.”

  It was only several months later, however, after the sheikh had become a friend, that Dickson asked him how many date trees he really owned.

  “God alone knoweth,” the sheikh replied, “but there cannot be less than ninety thousand.”

  Returning to Basrah from the Euphrates trip, Gertrude was struck again by the disdain of her colleagues and the humiliation of working without an official position. It was only because of Sir Percy Cox’s kindness, she allowed, that she was able to continue her work. Her loyalty to Cox was growing stronger while her fealty to Hogarth, her friend and Cairo chief who refused to give her a title or pay her a salary, was weakening. Embarrassed and irritated by a number of things that had happened, on June 15, responding to a letter from Hogarth, she dropped her reserve and answered her old mentor angrily:

  “I want to express some pretty strong feelings, if you don’t mind. You say in this letter that you are putting something from one of my private letters into the Bulletin and I hear that you have done so on more than one occasion.” Cox had telegraphed Hogarth not to publish this material, and she agreed. “You would not like it, would you, if you were to find bits of your private letters to me in the Basrah summaries. The position is exactly parallel.”

  But even worse, the work she was doing for Cairo was more a favor to Hogarth than an official assignment.

  I have no official status here with regard to Cairo; you have not given me one. I’m not your correspondent; if I think there is something which you would be interested to have I must ask as a favour that it should be sent to you. [And, she reminded him,] I was not even sent here by you; I was sent by the Viceroy with the request that I might be allowed to see all secret papers and given every opportunity to study tribal history. But even if I were officially your correspondent, nothing that I sent you could be used officially except what had been passed by Col. Beach and Sir P.C. Private letters are private letters. They don’t carry official weight. I now feel that you have made things very difficult for me.… I hope you will shortly define my duties more clearly. There are a number of things which I know would interest you that I don’t get to you because there is no one whose business it is to send them.

  There was some specific information that she wanted to send to Hogarth, but she needed Sir Percy’s permission to do so. “He is immensely kind in such matters and raises no difficulties, but it would still be a great deal more convenient for both of us if I were not sending you such notes by special favour.

  “I have also finished a number of Personalities on the Euphrates side and as soon as I have a typist I will get them ready for you. Again this is a matter dependent on Sir Percy’s kindess—I have no right to a typist. Further I told Mr. Lawrence that I am in a difficulty about my board and lodging here.” She was not receiving a salary and her landlords were not charging her rent, “but they admit that if I were being billeted officially, that would be all right. I don’t want a salary, as you know, but it seems monstrous that these good people should be keeping me out of the hospitality allowance they get from their firm.” Cox had told her that if Cairo gave her an official position, they should also give her a salary. She didn’t want much, she assured Hogarth, only “enough to defray my keep.”

  All of these matters, she continued, had been discussed with Lawrence. But “Mr. Lawrence left all these threads hanging and nearly two months have passed without any appreciable advance towards a solution.”

  Two days later, still upset, she sent off a note to Domnul, now back in London after completing his work in India: “You don’t know how difficult my job is here; but I continue to be very glad to be here.” The more difficult it was, the more she felt she ought to stay.

  Her mood changed dramatically a fortnight later, when she learned that her persistence and stoicism had finally paid off. Her status had been officially upgraded: Gertrude Bell was declared a full member of Sir Percy Cox’s Political staff of the India Expeditionary Force D. With a fixed monthly salary of three hundred rupees and the title of Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo, Major Miss Bell was now the only female Political Officer in the British forces.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  An Independent Woman

  It was Sir Percy’s job to keep India informed of Arab sentiment in the Gulf, keep track of the intentions of Ibn Saud and Ibn Rashid and keep watch over the activities of German spies. He was to keep apprised of the Mesopotamian tribes from Basrah to Baghdad and in neighboring Persia, and to know the sheikhs and their mood. As a member of General Headquarters Intelligence, he wrote later, he was involved with “assisting in the examination of prisoners and spies, the sifting of information, and the provision of informers and interpreters.”

  No member of his staff was better qualified for this work than Gertrude. But she faced a Political Officers’ clique as hostile as the Military Intelligence fraternity she had just left behind: Colonel Leachman was arrogant; Hubert Young ignored her; and A. T. Wilson, Cox’s brilliant deputy who took particular pleasure in sending out piles of reports laced with references to the Old Testament or quotes from Bacon, Milton and Shakespeare, was suspicious of her friendships with influential men in Cairo, Delhi and London.

  As she sat across from him at lunch in the Political Mess, only his snide allusions to St. John Philby or others at the table enabled her to deduce a few crumbs of the policy feast he was dishing up to Delhi and London. Concerned about her plans for the future of Iraq, he made certain to exclude her from his decision-making process. He refused to give her access to information going out and refused to tell her the codes for his cables and secret telegrams coming in. Although he had won a Distinguished Service medal, the gallantry he was praised for played no part in his relations with Gertrude. Nevertheless, the temporary appointment of George Lloyd to Sir Percy Cox’s staff made her feel less isolated. An occasional morning ride with him would give them a chance to talk things over.

  As interesting as she found the work, the lack of friends left her lonely. “I feel rather detached from you,” she lamented in a letter to her father. “I wish I could sit somewhere midway and have a talk with you once or twice a week.” The “kind” and “generous” Sir Percy Cox, the Chief Political Officer, was still somewhat aloof, shy and reserved, and although she met with him several times a week, he was not the type whose advice she cou
ld seek or with whom she could ever gossip.

  Daily events, large and small, sent her emotions reeling, roller-coasting from happiness to disappointment and back again. On Monday, June 5, 1916, the Sharif Hussein raised his standard and led his men in the Hejaz against Turkish forces. If the actual fighting at Mecca was only a prelude, Gertrude noted victoriously a few weeks later, it was still “one up to Egypt and my beloved chiefs there … the revolt of the Holy Places is an immense moral and political asset.” When Hugh wrote to ask his daughter if she had been responsible for instigating the revolt, she confided, “No, I didn’t stir up the Sharif! he stirred himself up. But, it was partly about all that business that I went to India.”

  The excitement she had felt in June was soon tempered by the open opposition to the Arab Revolt by the Viceroy of India, who called it a “displeasing surprise,” and feared that the Muhammadans in India would see it as “Christian interference” with the Islamic religion.

  More frustration came in July. After George Lloyd paid a visit to the front at Amara, where the British army was still fighting the Turks on the way to Baghdad, he returned from the scorching heat with harrowing accounts of confusion and incompetence, of soldiers suffering from a drastic lack of ice and a paucity of food. “Human skill in organization and human foresight have seldom had a less satisfactory advertisement than in this campaign,” Gertrude charged in a letter to her parents. “Someday I’ll tell you tales about it all—and you won’t believe me. No one could who hasn’t seen the things going on. I do not think the Indian Government can escape blame—I don’t think it should.” But she blamed the government in London for not carefully thinking out a policy: “We’ve paid for this negligence and want of forethought in blood and misery, in lives that can’t be brought back.”