Relieved to know that her own brother was safely in England and thankful he was not fighting in Mesopotamia, she acknowledged: “The real difficulty here is that we don’t know exactly what we intend to do in this country. Can you persuade people to take your side when you are not sure in the end whether you’ll be there to take theirs? No wonder they hesitate; and it would take a good deal of potent persuasion to make them think that your side and theirs are compatible.” Neither the government in London nor the government in India had made firm plans for the future. Furthermore, to the dismay of many Arabs, the Sharif Hussein, who was counting on help from an uprising in Syria, had now drawn up a statement proclaiming himself King of all the Arabs.
To make matters worse, whatever persuasive powers she and Sir Percy had used to try to neutralize Ibn Rashid had been unsuccessful. “We didn’t succeed in roping in Ibn Rashid,” she reported unhappily. But, she continued, “it’s not the immediate war problems here I think of most; it’s the problems after the war, and I don’t know what sort of hand we shall be able to take in solving them. However there’s no harm in thinking about them and that’s what I do. Write, too,” she pleaded. “I’ve plenty of official openings for that.”
Soon after, Percy Cox left once again for upriver, leaving her to his contrary deputy, A. T. Wilson. As the summer progressed, those who could, escaped Basrah’s oppressive heat: by August, Mr. Dobbs, suffering from exhaustion, had gone to India, and George Lloyd had left for Cairo. “I have a good many acquaintances but no friends, except for Mr. Dobbs and Gen. MacMunn,” Gertrude wrote home. She had found an ally in MacMunn, the Inspector General of Communications, “a nice creature, full of vitality and energy.” They often went out on the river together in his launch. But, she added achingly, “I can’t tell you what it’s like to have nobody, nobody whom I have ever known before or who has ever known me before.” Her only woman friend, Dorothy Van Ess, had also gone on holiday to India. Before she left, Gertrude asked her to bring back a few thin dresses. Mrs. Van Ess recalled seeing some frocks in a smart shop near the Taj Mahal Hotel. She cautioned, though, that they might be very expensive. “My dear,” Gertrude said, “pay whatever you have to; I must have clothes!”
The heat had become unbearable, as if the city were smothered under a heavy, wet wool blanket. All of Basrah had taken to their roofs to sleep. Outdoors, in the middle of the night with the temperature at well over 100 degrees, Gertrude awoke to find herself and her silk nightgown in a pool of sweat. “Everything you touch is hot, all the inanimate objects—your hair—if that’s inanimate—the biscuit you eat, the clothes you put on.” Malaria and typhoid were on the rampage, and clerks, typists and servants “go down before you can wink.” Off and on through July and August Gertrude too was out with fever; in September she was stricken with jaundice.
For two weeks she lay limp as cloth, recuperating at an officers’ rest house on the river. She had never been so ill before. But by September 20 she was strong enough to sit outdoors on the hospital verandah, noting that she had done nothing but eat and sleep and read novels. Her reading ranged from romantic fiction to philosophical fantasies, from Anthony Hope at one end to The Crock of Gold at the other, and she asked that her favorite London bookseller send her four to six books a month.
Two weeks later, still at the rest house, she gladly put on a woolen dress. The heat had disappeared: it was now only ninety degrees and she was shivering. With the cooler weather ahead, her thoughts, naturally, turned once again to clothes. She requested a violet felt winter hat, a black satin gown, some thick silk shirts, a purple knitted coat, a white serge motoring coat, and a satin embroidered Chinese coat to wear as an evening wrap. Joyfully, she informed her father that she was finally receiving her copies of The Times, but for some reason, Smith & Sons had neglected to include her weekly edition of the Literary Supplement. “Would you mind asking him what the deuce he means by it?” she bristled.
She had been out of the office exactly one month, and when she returned in early October, she learned that her official reports had evoked accolades in London. She noted proudly a few weeks afterward that she had received complimentary letters from various people, including Austin Chamberlain. Only a short while later, on December 16, 1916, upon his departure from Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon would shower her with praise: “I welcome the opportunity … of recording my high appreciation of the services of … Miss Gertrude Bell.… Her intimate knowledge of Arabia, ability and energy, have rendered her services of great value. The manner in which she has so long devoted herself to the work of the Arab Bureau, under the most trying conditions of country and climate, is deserving of special notice.”
Her new duties now included acting as an intermediary between Sir Percy Cox and the Arabs, and it was this work which she found most satisfying: “I’m gradually becoming a sort of cushion between bewildered and mostly miscreant sheikhs and the ultimate authority,” she explained. Drifting for a moment to memories of Doughty-Wylie, she added pensively, “Yes, it has been a godsend all this. I can’t think what I should have done without it. And it stretches on into the future—but I don’t think of the future; to live today and then sleep, that’s enough.”
She hoped that in the not too distant future, a letter she was composing to Fahad Bey would bring some rewards. The Paramount Chief of the Anazeh, who controlled the land along the western borders of the Euphrates, had resisted British attempts at friendship. Even when an envoy had been sent to plead the British case, the sheikh had stubbornly refused to see him; his sympathy lay, as it always had, with the Turks. The Ottomans had long ago earned his loyalty by making his father a “Kaimmakam,” giving him the right to tax every caravan that crossed his land; Fahad Bey had inherited the title and the tribute that went with it. Nevertheless, since he had five thousand riflemen at his beck and call, Gertrude felt it worth her while to try to befriend him, and in the autumn of 1916 she sent a message to the tribal chief. It would be several months before she received a reply.
The intensity of the heat and the stress of war had taken their toll. Her hair was turning gray, and worse, when she washed it, it fell out in clumps. She had requested “two bottles of hair stuff” from Rudolfe on Sloane Street, but she feared her letter may have gone down with the SS Arabia: “Rudolfe might be asked if he got the letter, otherwise I shall be bald.”
Bald or not, by mid-November she had gathered enough strength to travel, and packing some food and clothes and portable furnishings, she took the night train for Qurnah, dining in an empty train car on tinned tongue and tinned pears, lunching the next day with the local sheikh to draw out some needed information. The following week she made an archaeological venture on the Euphrates, west to Nasariyah, to visit the mounds of Ur of the Chaldees. The ruins of the ancient town from which Abraham had taken flight were being threatened by railway engineers and army generals, and she took it upon herself to protect the site from their ravages. But an urgent event hurried her back to Headquarters: Ibn Saud, the sheikh she had wanted to visit for so long, was on his way to Basrah.
The legendary Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, husband of sixty-five wives, hero of swashbuckling exploits, including his escape from Kuwait, his seizure of Riyadh and his defeat of the Turks at Hasa in 1914, had earned the title of desert warrior and desert statesman. A commanding presence swathed in white robes and checkered kafeeyah, forty years old and massively built, six foot three inches tall, dark skinned, with black hair and black pointed beard, a straight nose and flaring nostrils, he arrived in Basrah on the night of November 26, 1916.
He came with Sir Percy Cox from Kuwait, where he had signed a treaty with the British and received investiture as Knight Commander of the India Empire. Three thousand rifles, four machine guns and a subsidy of five thousand pounds a month had been promised Ibn Saud in the hope of keeping him, the leader of the Wahhabi, the Bedouin Islamic fundamentalists, from attacking Britain’s new ally, the Sharif Hussein, guardian of Mecca and leader of the revolt against the Turk
s. Hostility had grown between the two Emirs with every incremental increase in Hussein’s power; now Ibn Saud resented furiously the Sharif’s recent claim to being the King of the Arabs.
On the morning following Ibn Saud’s arrival, surrounded by an audience of notables, the desert sovereign was presented with a jeweled sword in the name of the new British army commander, General Maude. There had once been hope that Ibn Saud would start the Arab rebellion, but the possibility had disappeared with the death of Captain Shakespear, a British agent killed in crossfire in the winter of 1915 while on a mission to see him; no treaty had been signed between the Emir and Britain. Sir Percy and the India Government officials believed that Ibn Saud represented the strongest weapon against the Turks. His victory over the Ottomans would have ensured him immediate control of all Arabia; furthermore, it would have kept Mesopotamia under the aegis of the India Government. But it was too late. The British Government in London and Cairo had backed the Sharif Hussein against the Turks. Now, at the very least, the treaty signed in Kuwait would keep Ibn Saud from attacking the Sharif. And if he fired his attentions on Ibn Rashid, so much the better.
A singular tour in Basrah had been organized in Ibn Saud’s honor; he was given a show of British technology that was meant to dazzle. Within a few hours he stood before a parade of British forces, saw high explosives fired from an improvised trench and watched as antiaircraft shells burst in the air. He was taken on a brand-new railway and was driven through the desert in a motor car; at a hospital housed in a palace on loan from the Sheikh of Muhammarah, he was shown his own long, slim hand under an X-ray machine, and a short while later he witnessed an airplane zooming into the sky. Gertrude, wearing a silk-brimmed hat, smart jacket and skirt, with a camera case slung over her shoulder, stayed close to his side and, speaking in her classical Arabic, an accent strange to his ear, demanded: “Abdul Aziz, look at this,” or “Abdul Aziz, what do you think of that?”
Amazing as the parade of British force might have been, it was not nearly as startling to him as Gertrude herself. He had never before met a European woman, and although he had been warned in advance, nothing had prepared him for the fact that this unveiled female was not only allowed in his sight but was accorded priorities and permitted to engage in all the procedures, whether they were discussions on Arabian politics or social functions in his honor. He looked down with heavily lidded eyes, dismayed at the Englishwoman who seemed to be everywhere.
She, in turn, found him “one of the most striking personalities” she had ever encountered, “full of wonder but never agape. He asked innumerable questions and made intelligent comments.… He’s a big man,” she observed, adding ironically, “I wish we could expound to him the science of peace, but we’ve got to get through this war first and hope that the better things will come after. Will they? It’s an open question whether we don’t do these people more harm than good and one feels still more despairing about it now that our civilisation has broken down so completely. But we can’t leave them alone, they won’t be left alone anyway, and whatever you may feel the world moves on—even in Arabia.”
“Politician, ruler and raider, Ibn Sa’ud illustrates a historic type,” Gertrude wrote in a communiqué for the Foreign Office and the Arab Bulletin. “Such men as he are the exception in any community, but they are thrown up persistently by the Arab race in its own sphere, and in that sphere they meet its needs.… The ultimate source of power, here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality of the commander. Through him, whether he be an Abbasid Khalif or an Amir of Nejd, the political entity holds, and with his disappearance it breaks.” The echo of her words would ring throughout the region for the rest of the century, in men like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.
Her detailed account of Ibn Saud and British relations with Arabia was finished the first week of December 1916 and sent off to the highest officials in England, Egypt and India. As important as her reporting was regarded, however, she felt restrained; a month before, T. E. Lawrence had left for his first adventure with the Sharif’s army in Arabia. But as a woman, Gertrude was confined primarily to her desk. With a heavy sense of frustration, she wrote: “One can’t do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it; one can get the things recorded in the right way and that means, I hope, that unconsciously people will judge events as you think they ought to be judged. But it’s small change for doing things, very small change I feel at times.”
“Do you know,” Gertrude mused, as she sat in her room ten days before Christmas 1916, writing her weekly letter to her father, “I was thinking yesterday what I would pick out as the happiest things I’ve done in all my life, and I came to the conclusion that I should choose the old Italian journeys with you, those long ago journeys which were so delicious. I’ve been very unhappy in the big things and very happy in the little things … only in that very big thing, complete love and confidence in my own family—I’ve had that always and can’t lose it. And you are the pivot of it.”
Her father had always been the source of her strength. From earliest childhood she had received his undiluted, never-ending love, and it was from him that she gained the self-esteem and self-assurance to reach as far as she could. “The abiding influence” in her life, her stepmother wrote later, “was her relation to her father. Her devotion to him, her whole-hearted admiration, the close and satisfying companionship between them, their deep mutual affection—these were to both the very foundation of existence.”
Her father’s affection served as a potent elixir, flushing away her disappointments, reinforcing her vigor. In return for his confidence in her, she trusted in him completely: he was the final authority; and even when he had caused her pain by refusing to accept her engagement to Henry Cadogan, she reluctantly agreed to his decision. From her youngest days, she and her father were friends; there were times when she played the role of Hugh Bell’s child and times when she played his companion; and whatever role she played, he was always her guardian angel.
Twenty years later, she found another companion in the charming St. John Philby. They shared a common aversion to A. T. Wilson, whom Philby found “domineering,” and enjoyed a common interest in charting the tribes and the genealogies of the sheikhs. But more than that, they became good friends. On December 21, 1916, Gertrude informed her family that she and St. John were going up the Tigris together. Philby had been asked by Cox to report on restless tribesmen up the river. Gertrude was reluctant to participate in the Christmas celebrations in Basrah, and thus felt relieved as they embarked together in Philby’s launch. It was her fourth Christmas in foreign parts: “Arabia, Boulogne, Cairo and Qalat Salih. The last is where I expect to be on Xmas Day and I’m truly thankful to escape any attempt at feasts here.” The celebration would only be a painful reminder of the husband and family she lacked.
On a warm and sunny day they steamed up the bending Tigris, sailing past villages of reed-built homes, pausing to look at the tomb where the Prophet Ezra was said to be buried, stopping finally at Qalat Salih, where their mutual friend Mr. Bullard had lent them his cottage. Gertrude and the handsome Philby talked for hours, and she described the stay enthusiastically: “We occupied his tiny house, sent for rations and prepared to lead a rough tin-fed life. But behold my boy developed a genius for cooking and we lived for 5 days on the fat of the land.”
Explorations through the marshes took them to a part of the country that she had never seen before: village after village built of reeds, and fields of rice irrigated by the canals along the Tigris. After a week of meeting the marsh Arabs and dining with local sheikhs, Philby returned to Headquarters to welcome his wife, just arrived from India. Gertrude remained in the marshes a few extra days, gathering information about tribes and families that had baffled her in Basrah. She returned home alone, welcomed only by her mail from England.
The new year of 1917 brought with it rain and mud and the danger of walking to work, but Gertrude’s life was mad
e easier now by two servants and new living quarters—a two-room suite in the Political Office—allotted to her by Percy Cox. Her apartment contained a large sitting room and a dressing room screened off from the bed, “a blessing,” she wrote, since she had been “miserably uncomfortable,” lacking a place to work at night. Of course, there were still the small irritations: the tinned butter and tinned milk had grown so tasteless that she no longer even wanted them; the sheath of her pen had broken, requiring a new broad-nibbed fountain pen from England; her hair was still falling out; and a box of clothing sent from home by Thomas Cook & Sons had been waylaid in Bombay.
As soon as it was brought to her in Basrah, Gertrude hastily opened the carton. Eager to try on the black satin gown tucked inside, she sifted through the packing papers, but instead of running her hands over the rich, smooth fabric, all she could find was a small cardboard box and, in it, a black coat, a gold flower and some net. Nearly in tears, she wrote to Florence that the carton had been tampered with in India. “The gown has been abstracted. Isn’t it infuriating?” she cried. Ten days later it was still bothering her: “Isn’t it a tragedy about my black satin gown. Of course it’s just the very gown most wanted … (I feel as if I were playing the leading role in the Emperor’s New Clothes).” But even worse than the loss of her dress was the loss of her hair. “Presently I shall have to ask you to send me a nice wig. I haven’t got enough hair left to pin a hat to,” she moaned.
But these irksome matters were unimportant compared to the praise she had won for her work. “Happy to tell you that I hear my utterances receive a truly preposterous attention in London,” she proudly informed her parents on January 13, 1917. One week later she received a commendation from the India Office in which it was noted: “They lectured her on the Indian Official Secrets Act and actually censored her letters. For a woman of her status the position must have been uncommonly galling; but she put up with it and I imagine that the improvement in the political attitude of Basrah to Cairo and H.M.G. [His Majesty’s Government] is largely due to her work.”
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