Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  A year earlier, in 1916, when David Hogarth was informed of the Sykes-Picot pact, he had written at once to the Director of Intelligence, Captain Hall, urging that no one else be told: “The conclusion of this Agreement is of no immediate service to our Arab policy as pursued here, and will only not be a grave disadvantage if, for some time to come, it is kept strictly secret.” The pact was concealed from Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell for almost a year.

  When Cox learned of the Sykes-Picot agreement, he was furious. Not only had he been deceived, but what would become of Mesopotamia? Cox had hoped that Iraq would be annexed under the India Government and that Ibn Saud would be appointed king. McMahon and the Arab Bureau had promised that position to the Sharif Hussein. Now there was even talk that, under Sykes-Picot, Baghdad would have a local ruler, Basrah would belong to the British, and Mosul would go to the French. Cox demanded an explanation.

  Arriving in Baghdad in June 1917 to present the Arab Bureau’s side, Ronald Storrs was taken by river launch to Cox’s house. As they stood, cocktails in hand, on the balcony overlooking the Tigris, Cox and Gertrude pumped him for information. At dinner, they questioned him more. What was the thinking in Cairo? they wanted to know, and what was happening in Arabia? Among other things, he reported to them on the Hejaz. He had returned several times, he said, and with T. E. Lawrence to assist him, had met the man who would set the desert ablaze. The man was Faisal, third son of the Sharif Hussein, slim and high-strung, a skillful leader, proven to be shrewd in strategy, strong in battle. As Storrs described the charismatic Faisal, Gertrude took note.

  At the office the following morning, it was her turn to fill Storrs in. She described in detail the situation in Mesopotamia, ran down the list of tribes and chiefs, habits and traditions, rivalries and politics, checking off each with masterly ease. Then, like a schoolgirl skipping class, she led him on a fast-paced tour of the town, interviewing sheikhs and notables to hear their positions, taking the political temperature (as she often did) of the merchants in the bazaar. By the end of the visit, Gertrude had made her mark on the man who would soon be Governor of Jerusalem. Her knowledge of Iraq, her familiarity with the people, her understanding of the relationship between the Arabs of Syria, Arabia and Mesopotamia were unique, Storrs wrote in his diary. Her “first-class brain,” her “universal” knowledge, her “level” judgment, outstanding. But for all her strength and drive, he wisely observed, she should be careful: “her frail body” needed rest if it was to endure the heat of summer.

  For Gertrude, the visit had added a brilliant spark to her daily routine. Coupled with the recent arrival in Baghdad (thanks to her persuasive efforts with Sir Percy) of her good friend St. John Philby as able deputy to Cox, it sent her spinning. Her work in Mesopotamia now was exhilarating. There had never been anything quite like it before, she wrote to her father: “It’s amazing. It’s the making of a new world.” Outlining a plan for Whitehall, she noted she wanted to take “a decisive hand” in the country’s future. “I shall be able to do that, I shall indeed,” she affirmed. “What does anything else matter when the job is such a big one?”

  For the first time in years she began to think about what lay around the corner. Her work had reached a new level of excitement; her little house had begun to feel more like home. Friends like Philby and Bullard frequently came for dinner and good conversation, and over a well-cooked roast and the proper wines she enjoyed pronouncing her views on everything from the strengths and weaknesses of Turkish administration to the Labour Party’s position in England, to the price of meat in Baghdad, to the eating habits of her newest gift, a gazelle. If the latest clothes that arrived fom England weren’t quite what she had envisioned (one of them was “no more of an evening gown than it was a fur coat,” she complained. “I shall just have not to dine out when it gets hot”), the friendliness of the local people, the warmth of the sunshine, the abundance of flowers and fresh fruits more than made up for her disappointments. “It’s so wonderful here, I can’t tell you how much I love it,” she wrote her father.

  Rather surprisingly, she refused his invitation to visit England on her vacation. With so much going on, she did not want to leave Iraq right now, she explained. Still, she reassured him, it was his love that gave her the strength to carry on. And in the strange way that she wrote to him, little girlishness combined with womanly passion, she told him their relationship was special: “unique. That’s what it is, dearest beloved one. You know there’s nothing in the world which I would not bring to you, big things and little, with complete assurance of your perfect sympathy and understanding and when necessary forgiveness. What you were to me at a time of sorrow so acute that I still wonder how one can endure such things and live, I shall never be able to say to you—but you know, and in the midst of all this new world which has grown up round me my regret is that I cannot share it more fully with you.” As for the East, “It’s a new life, a new possibility of carrying on existence.… I’m loving it, you know, loving my work and rejoicing in the confidence of my chief.”

  Summer hit like a furnace blast; by July the daily temperature reached 120 degrees. Gertrude’s parasol was useless; her fair skin baked in the sun, her cheeks stung from the swirling dust, her eyeballs ached in the fierce wind. Even at night the air hardly cooled. The only way she could sleep was to take her mattress to the roof and lie outdoors between wringing wet sheets; when they dried she woke and soaked them again in cold water. It wasn’t long before a tropical illness landed her in the hospital, where she fastened the emerald pin her father had sent for her birthday onto her nightgown.

  Sometime in August she was well enough to laugh at a story she heard about an Englishman who had visited a Turkish military hospital before the war. The hospital’s official ledger listed patients as: “Admitted; Cured; Died; Ran Away.” On the last page of the ledger was the total: “Admittances; 6. Cured; 0. Died; 2. Ran Away; 4.”

  At the office, an ugly dispute with the army Commander-in-Chief had soured the air. As great a commanding soldier as he was, General Maude was imperious; arrogant toward Cox (his classmate at Sandhurst), intolerant of the Arabs. His interference in political affairs had brought the mild-mannered Cox to the point of thinking seriously about resigning. Sir Percy’s presence, as mentor, father figure, and colleague, meant too much to Gertrude to let this situation go unheeded. She owed him more than her job; her life had become linked to his. In the way that people working together feel a sexual energy derived from thinking and acting intensely in tandem, she felt exhilaration. (She would never have put a sexual connotation on things related to Cox; more likely she would have called it admiration, but whatever its label, it held a strong pull.) With Cox’s permission, she composed a scathing letter to her good friend Arthur Hirtzel, Permanent Under Secretary for the India Office, likening the army command to “denizens of a lunatic asylum.”

  The power of her friendships, and her words, were not to be taken lightly. Hirtzel forwarded her letter to Lord Curzon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It confirmed his worst suspicions, Curzon said, and promised to take up the matter with the War Cabinet (without, of course, mentioning Miss Bell). But before General Maude could be reprimanded, he was taken ill. Two days later, on November 16, 1917, the general died of cholera.

  While General Maude was being laid to rest, the Arab army under Faisal’s command was on the move. Its main goal was to sabotage the Turkish railway line, the key communications link for the Turks, that ran from Medina in the Hejaz to Damascus in Syria. The irregular bands of Arab warriors were the perfect fighters for this campaign of guerrilla warfare, but it would take more than just the Sharifian army to make it a success. Tribes that were long-standing enemies had to be persuaded to fight side by side. With the understanding that Faisal would be their leader, the men of the Billi, the Juheina, the Harb, the Rwallah and the Beni Sakhr all agreed to join the Arab Revolt.

  In the summer of 1916, when their revolt began, they took control of Jeddah, Rabi
gh, Yanbu al Bahr and Mecca. Six months later, in January 1917, with Lawrence serving as Faisal’s political officer, the Arab army, with help from the British navy, captured the seaport of al Wajh. Then, after marching eight hundred miles north from Mecca, the Arabs won a decisive victory at Aqaba. It was Gertrude’s friends the Abu Tayi—the Howeitat tribe from northern Arabia—who led the attack, with Lawrence at their side, and the success made a hero of T. E. Lawrence. In September the Arab army had raided the Hejaz railway line at Mudawara; destroying a Turkish locomotive, they killed seventy Turkish soldiers, wounded thirty more and and took ninety Turkish prisoners. Later that autumn, after some serious mishaps in the Yarmuk Valley, they derailed a train carrying Jamal Pasha, the Governor of Syria and commander of a Turkish army corps. By the end of November 1917, assisted by two Iraqi officers, the skillful military expert Jafar al Askari and the politically savvy Nuri Said, the Arab army was clearing the way for Britain’s General Allenby to march from Suez into Jerusalem and from there (with Lawrence and Faisal behind him) into Damascus. Armed with Lawrence’s promise of future British backing, Faisal was on the path to become ruler of Syria.

  David Hogarth would later credit Gertrude Bell for much of the success of the Arab Revolt by providing the “mass of information” about the “tribal elements ranging between the Hejaz Railway and the Nefud, particularly about the Howeitat group.” It was this information, Hogarth emphasized, which “Lawrence, relying on her reports, made signal use of in the Arab campaigns of 1917 and 1918.”

  With help from the American writer Lowell Thomas, Lawrence was camel-riding the path to fame, but Gertrude deliberately turned her back on publicity. In October she was awarded the C.B.E., Commander of the British Empire, yet requests for interviews were tossed in the wastebasket and her parents chastised for talking to journalists. “Please please don’t supply information about me,” she scolded. “I’ve said this so often before that I thought you understood how much I hate the whole advertisement business.” Self-promotion was abhorrent. Not that she had any self-doubts. One of the best Political Officers, Colonel Leachman, had even told her that her “unbounded conceit was the talk of Iraq.”

  When the Balfour Declaration was released to the public at the end of the year, Gertrude attacked it viciously. Sir Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, had written a letter to Lord Rothschild, leader of the Jewish community in England, promising “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration vowed not to prejudice “the civil and religious rights” of the Arabs already living in Palestine.

  “I hate Mr. Balfour’s Zionist pronouncement,” Gertrude wrote venomously to her parents. “It’s my belief that it can’t be carried out, the country is wholly unsuited to the ends the Jews have in view; it is a poor land, incapable of great development and with a solid two thirds of its population Mohammedan Arabs who look on Jews with contempt. To my mind it’s a wholly artificial scheme divorced from all relation to facts and I wish it the ill success it deserves—and will get, I fancy.” Part of her prediction came true: the trouble she forecast between Arabs and Jews was to continue for five generations, and not until almost the end of the twentieth century did the people of Palestine—Jews and Arabs—recognize each other’s right to exist on the same land. But the “wholly artificial scheme” of a Jewish national homeland did, in fact, become a reality. Indeed, Israel became the only democratic state in the Middle East.

  As concerned as she was about Palestine, she felt besieged by problems closer to home. Shiite tribesmen in the Euphrates Valley had been helping the Turks, and Cox had given orders to stop their communications with the enemy. He had even visited the area himself. But the trouble continued, and in December 1917 Gertrude made plans to investigate. Few people knew the region as well as she did.

  Piling her suitcases and camp furniture into an open Ford, she settled herself in the motor car and, with her servant at the wheel, drove off in the clear January sunshine, bumping along the familiar desert road southwest toward Karbala. She had been on that road before: once, years ago, euphoric, as she headed back to Baghdad with the plan of Ukhaidir, the great palace ruins she had discovered, in her pocket; once, downcast, as she returned from her imprisonment in Hayil in Arabia. She felt herself sliding back into that earlier atmosphere, savoring the innocence of those times, knowing full well that they had disappeared. She feared that even the good-natured Fattuh, her former servant and so much a part of those journeys, was a victim of the Turks.

  For hours on end she looked out on little else but the past; the dirt road ran through endless vacant land, cutting through only two small market towns. Not until late afternoon, as the car wobbled through clouds of dust, did the dirt change to grass and the tufts of desert brush burst into palm and willow trees. Another whole day along the Euphrates, and she reached the holy city of Karbala. Like its sister city Najaf, it had once been a hotbed of fanaticism, a place where Shiites plotted jihad, holy war, against Christian nonbelievers. This was the founding region of Islam, where Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad, and Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, were each treacherously slain and where their devout Shiite followers, many from Persia, still brought the corpses of their dead. (The schism between Muslims that resulted in Shiites and Sunnis came early on. The Shiites wanted the warrior Ali ibn Ali Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet, to succeed Muhammad as Caliph; the Sunnis accepted Abu Bakr, a close friend of Muhammad’s, as his successor.)

  Other travelers were coming here too: Persians serving as espionage agents for the Germans and the Turks; enemy caravans from Damascus and Aleppo, buying food and supplies. Karbala’s merchants made a handsome profit on the goods, and its sheikhs collected a hefty tax on the loaded camels. What’s more, the Syrian customers barraged the townsmen with anti-British propaganda. The locals were easy prey. The British had been depleting their resources, taking their flocks of sheep and cattle to feed the troops, demanding high taxes to cover the cost of administration; in addition, the British had set up blockades to try to stop the trafficking with the Turks. The Arabs of Karbala were in an uproar.

  Gertrude moved cautiously through the narrow streets of the town, meeting with its notables, the first European woman to enter the dark, damp cell of its most renowned holy man. As strong as her arguments were, she needed every bit of her persuasive powers. Even then, it was too soon to know whether her words would have an effect.

  At Najaf the situation was even worse. The city, a web of underground houses connected by tunnels, a malignant, fanatical place, drew her in with its mystery and beauty. There, she wrote, the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, “so thick with the dust of ages that you can’t see through it—nor can they.”

  Heavy trade in contraband and handsome payoffs from the Turks kept the population of forty thousand Arabs on friendly terms with the enemy. What’s more, when tribes that were sympathetic to the British came to Najaf to purchase large amounts of grain, draining the food supplies, the locals expressed their resentment. As Gertrude phrased it after she met with the local sheikhs, “Things are not in a satisfactory state.”

  Stopping briefly at Babylon on the way back, she yearned even more for simpler times. She walked around the ruins, recalling the days when she had camped there with the German archaeologists. The war had turned the world upside down; now her former colleagues were the enemy. Her heart ached when she stood in the empty dusty room where Fattuh had put up her camp furniture and where she and the Germans had held eager conversations about her plans of Babylon and Ukhaidir. “What a dreadful world of broken friendships we have created between us,” she wrote.

  By the time she returned to Baghdad and her office on the Tigris, her nerves were on edge. She was nearing fifty and experiencing symptoms that often strike women that age. But with no close female friend with whom to compare notes, she searched helplessly for a reason. Before the two-week trip to the Euphrates she had complained of listlessness and anomie, even temporary amnesia. She
was constantly forgetting things, causing her to work more slowly and to continue later into the night. Tired and run down, she needed a companion, someone to look after her, to lend her a sympathetic ear. “What I really want is a wife,” she wrote to her parents. “I quite understand why men out here marry anyone who turns up!” Never long on patience, she found her temper shorter than ever. When her new boots did not arrive on time from England, she denounced her bootmaker of fifteen years as “a rogue” and accused him of “abominable practices.” When she sat down at the lunch table in the mess and a plate of bully beef was put before her, her body tensed. Fresh food was scarce, she knew, but it was the fourteenth day in a row she was being served the tasteless tinned meat. She looked at the plate of rations, threw down her knife and fork and burst into tears.

  But these complaints were like paper cuts compared to the deeper wound that festered. Time had not yet healed the pain she still felt from the loss of Doughty-Wylie. “Oh Father, dearest,” she wrote, “do you know that tonight (February 22) is just three years since D. and I parted.… I’ve lived again through the four days of three years ago almost minute by minute.” Once again her father wanted her to come home for the summer; once again she was reluctant. “Dearest you know I love you but this sorrow at the back of everything deadens me in a way to all else, to whether I go home or whether I stay here in the East, or what happens. And yet … whether I’m with you or away from you, you’re just as real a comfort to me always.”

  She had molded her house and garden around her like a protective womb. From her sitting room, with its comfortable, chintz-covered chairs, Persian rugs and pottery shards on the mantel, she wrote her letters to friends, pausing sometimes with pen in hand to peer out the window and watch her gazelle. Her Chaldean servant kept her house and clothes in order, her cook took charge of the food and her gardener followed her precise instructions, coaxing flowers from the same kinds of seeds as her favorite blossoms at Rounton. If only she had ordered bulbs of daffodil and narcissus! Still, she smiled, seeing irises and verbena flourish in their beds, violets flower bravely in their pots, roses almost always in bloom. As for the inevitable summer heat on the way, ceiling fans had been installed, along with new electric lights, and she felt a little better prepared. By the end of the year she would even add on another room.