She was enraged that British money was spent on maintaining troops in Palestine. She wanted it for Iraq, and wrote home bitterly: “If they withdrew the two Divisions from Palestine we could keep them here for a couple of years where they’re so urgently needed. But no,” she went on vindictively; “there’s the Jewish interest to reckon with. The Jews,” she added spitefully, “can buy silence on the subject of expenditure.”
For several weeks while the Cabinet kept a close eye on the activities of Sayid Talib, it engaged in hot debate over whether or not to include the provincial Shiites in the Council. The Ministers looked to Gertrude for advice; even the Arab Government considered her the leading authority on the tribes. She knew that the big landowners on the Council, including the Naqib, would try to keep them out. Nevertheless, she thought it not only fair, but essential for the survival of the Arab Government, that the Shiite tribes be included in the Council. They did, after all, represent a majority of the population. If they were not included, there could be another major rebellion.
But if she bowed to their demand for representation, she did not fall blindly in the face of their claims. Indeed, she observed, they had to be controlled by a strong Arab army. “Mesopotamia is not a civilised state,” she explained to her father; “it is largely composed of wild tribes who do not wish to shoulder the burden and expense of citizenship. In setting up an Arab state we are acting in the interests of the urban and village population which expects and rightly expects that it will ultimately leaven the mass.” But until that time, an Arab force would be needed to control the tribes and maintain order.
Every Arab, it seemed, whether townsman or tribesman, was finding his way to her door. “The number of heart to heart talks which take place in my office would surprise you!” she wrote glowingly to Hugh. “The Arabs who are our friends … constantly come to me, not only for advice on immediate conduct, but in order to ask about the future: ‘But what do you think, Khatun?’ ” Her response to them was far different from what it had been less than two years before, when she had urged caution. “I feel quite certain in my own mind that there is only one workable solution,” she explained to her father; “a son of the Sharif and for choice Faisal.” Yet among Iraqis there was not much sympathy for the Sharif. They scoffed at his assertion that he spoke for all the Arabs. They were Mesopotamian; he was from Mecca. They felt that he represented Britain; they wanted someone who represented them.
Nevertheless, now that the French had thrown Faisal out of Damascus, he was, she announced, “very very much the first choice.” His military experience in the Arab Revolt against the Turks, his administration of Syria, his diplomatic skills, his depth of character and his charisma would make him the perfect leader. Others might stand in the way, but she would do everything she could to ensure that none other than Faisal became the first King of Iraq.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Cairo Conference
“Upon my soul I’m glad I don’t know what this year is going to bring. I don’t think I ever woke on a first of January with such feelings of apprehension,” Gertrude declared at the start of 1921.
The new year began with a torrent of rain, but it wasn’t only the weather and the political situation that made her apprehensive. Except for her closest colleagues, she had very few friends. (The only woman she was close to was Aurelia Tod, the Italian wife of Lynch’s representative in Baghdad.) She cared little for socializing, and her contempt had left her without much of a personal life. Even the entertaining she did was part of her work, and guests who failed to conform to her style were simply banished from her mind. In the middle of a dinner to which she had invited one of her favorite Political Officers, Major Dickson, and his young bride, Violet, she turned to another male guest and, switching from Arabic to English, announced, “It is such a pity that promising young Englishmen go and marry such fools of women.”
“As Harold had been one of her ‘promising young Englishmen,’ ” Mrs. Dickson commented later, “I felt most uncomfortable.” To the bride, the evening was long and miserable, her hostess “rather aloof and unprepossessing.” But when Gertrude wrote home, she declared the dinner a “real success.”
Coats of numbness had hardened her. Resilient before, she was impervious now, her passions buried in the war, in the tombs of her lovers and friends and family members, her sensitivity crushed by the vicious behavior of A. T. Wilson. She protected herself as she had learned to do as a child: pushing away the pain, consuming herself in her work. It had left her bitter and lonely. On Christmas Day 1920, alone in her sitting room, she scrawled to Hugh: “As you know I’m rather friendless. I don’t care enough about people to take trouble about them and naturally enough they don’t trouble about me—why should they? Also all their amusements bore me to tears and I don’t join in them; the result is that except for the people I’m working with I see no one.”
She had been to the Coxes’ to help prepare for a dinner that night, and to the Tods’ for a Christmas tea with twenty children—English, Circassians, Jews, Christians and Arabs—all playing together “as if they had been born and bred in the same nurseries.” But joyful gatherings like the ones celebrated at Rounton were long gone; she noted that this was her eighth Christmas away from her family.
Sir Percy Cox was the steady factor in her life, the “Rock of Gibraltar,” gentle but firm, courteous but determined. She worked closely with him at the office, lunched with him every day and relaxed with him sometimes on weekends, boating, picnicking or shooting. A man of few words, he rarely spoke but listened carefully to those with something to say. Her influence over him was increasing. In fact, it was becoming so great that Philby later observed, “Gertrude Bell exercised an excessive and almost mesmeric effect on his judgment and decisions.”
The closer she was to Cox, the more jealous her colleagues became; with few exceptions, the Political Officers used every opportunity to mock her. On a day when she was having coffee with visiting sheikhs and the conversation lagged, she asked one of the Arabs how things were going in the desert. “The wind is blowing,” the sheikh replied. After he left she quickly repeated his words to the High Commissioner. But the dangerous agitation she predicted turned out to be nothing more than an actual weather report, and for a long time afterward her message was used against her. “The wind is blowing” became a regular, in-house British officers’ joke.
Reports of her brilliant opus, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, prepared by Miss Gertrude L. Bell, C.B.E., arrived mid-January in the newspapers from home. A literary achievement as well as a factual compilation, the official, 147-page publication had been presented as a White Paper to both Houses of Parliament. Loaded with anthropological, sociological, historical and political facts, it encompassed every important personage and explained every significant event that had taken place in Mesopotamia over the course of the six years since India Expeditionary Force D had entered Basrah, in November 1914, up to the current steps to establish an Arab Government. Beginning with a description of the lax and corrupt Ottoman rule, it went on, in highly detailed and descriptive prose, to account for the British occupation during and after the war; the problems with turbulent and pro-Turkish tribes; the difficulties in winning the loyalty of the sheikhs; the disaster at Kut; the occupation of Basrah, Baghdad, Mosul and the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, with their inflammatory religious leaders; the Anglo-French Declaration and the problems the British encountered up until the time of the mandate; the organization of the Civil Administration, including the establishment of schools and a unified educational system, the building of hospitals and medical care, the creation of a judicial system, the formation of a police corps, a commercial department and tax agencies; the pacification of the tribes during the 1920 uprising; the relations with the Arabs and the Kurds; and the nationalist movement.
It had taken Gertrude the better part of a year to write, and it won accolades in England. Nevertheless, she was more than a little annoyed at t
he sexist tone of the praise. Intellectually, she may have viewed herself as a man and even prided herself on being accepted by men as an equal, but being a woman, a capable woman herself, was never in dispute.
She wrote home angrily: “I’ve just got Mother’s letter of December 15 saying there’s a fandango about my report. The general line taken by the press seems to be that it’s most remarkable that a dog should be able to stand up on its hind legs—i.e. a female write a white paper. I hope they’ll drop that source of wonder and pay attention to the report itself, if it will help them to understand what Mesopotamia is like.” She wanted it clearly understood that the request for the report had come directly to her from the India Office and not, as suggested on the cover page, from A. T. Wilson. Moreover, she wrote, “I insisted, very much against his will, on doing it my own way, which though it might not be a good way was at least better than his. At any rate it’s done, for good or bad, and I’m thankful I’m not in England to be exasperated by reporters.”
But other events in England soon aggravated her even more: the debate over Mesopotamia had taken a bad turn. Severe unemployment from the post war Depression had brought on a taxpayers’ revolt; the public was fed up with the expense of supporting Britain’s newly mandated areas in the Middle East. Winston Spencer Churchill, now Colonial Secretary, had suggested that, to protect the oil interests in Persia and the route from Egypt to India, the base at Basrah should be maintained. But due to the high cost of keeping troops in the region, he proposed that the British pull out of the rest of Iraq. Gertrude and Cox found the notion absurd.
“As far as statecraft I really think you might search our history from end to end without finding poorer masters of it than Lloyd George and Winston Churchill,” she scoffed to her father. She had already suffered enough from Churchill’s poor decisions: his resolve to send in troops at Gallipoli had killed Doughty-Wylie. Now she foresaw, at his whim, the destruction of Mesopotamia.
In the face of such a threat, Cox had composed a letter to Whitehall explaining the risks of abandoning Iraq and the impossibility of keeping only Basrah. At Gertrude’s urging, and in the hope of quickly establishing a solid Arab government, he suggested choosing Faisal as Emir. On the morning of Sunday, January 10, Cox called Gertrude to his house. She found him sitting in the dining room, where he handed her a telegram he had just received from Churchill. Mortified by what she read, she went home and whisked off a note to Hugh:
“EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL. We have reached, I fear, the end of the chapter.… H.M.G. had placed the decision as to their policy in Mesopotamia in the hands of the Secretary of State for War and he therefore informed the High Commissioner and the Commander in Chief that he could not burden the British public with the expenditure necessary to carry out the programme suggested—i.e. Sir Percy’s recent proposal that we should bring about the selection of Faisal as Emir of Iraq, that being, in his view, the one hope of establishing speedily a stable Arab Govt and reducing the British army occupation.”
It was impossible, she insisted, to establish a native government without British support. And she still chafed at Wilson, calling him the source of the problems. From the day in May when he had first spoken contemptuously of an Arab Government, she explained, the nationalists had intensifed their anti-British campaign. It was true that the idea of a jihad appealed to the masses, and the prospect of looting and not having to pay taxes inspired the tribes, but, she emphasized, “A.T. stands convicted of one of the greatest errors of policy which we have committed in Asia—an error so great that it lies on the toss of a halfpenny whether we can retrieve it.”
A few weeks later everything changed.
Pressed by the fury in England over the cost of Mesopotamia alone—twenty million pounds sterling for the year of 1920—combined with the confusion in Baghdad over who should become Emir—a son of the Sharif Hussein or Sayid Talib or even a Turkish prince—and the dilemma over what to do with Palestine and TransJordan, Churchill summoned a small group of Orientalists to Egypt. The British Empire’s best minds on the Middle East would determine the fate of Mesopotamia, TransJordan and Palestine. From England, Churchill called in Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard of the RAF; Kinahan Cornwallis, an Intelligence expert attached to the Finance Ministry in Egypt; and the newest member of his team, the fair-haired, formerly retired Arab expert Colonel T. E. Lawrence. From Palestine Churchill sent for High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Wyndham Deedes; from Aden, General Scott; from Somalia, Sir Geoffrey Archer, who brought along two baby lions destined for the Cairo zoo; from Persia, A. T. Wilson, now representing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; from Arabia, General Ironside and Colonel Trevor. And from Mesopotamia he summoned Sir Percy Cox and the only woman among the forty official delegates, Miss Gertrude Bell.
By the middle of February Gertrude was preparing for the urgent conference in Cairo.
To represent the Iraqis, two members of the Council were picked to join the delegation: Jafar Pasha and Sasun Effendi; Sayid Talib, to his great disappointment, was kept at home. The night before they left, however, they all dined with Talib. Gertrude reported: “Amid potations of whisky he whispered in my ear in increasingly maudlin tones that he had always regarded me as his sister, always followed my advice and now saw in me his sole support and stay. And I, feeling profoundly that his ambitions never will and never should be fulfilled, could do nothing but murmur colourless expressions of friendship.” The following morning, February 24, 1921, the group was off, sailing down the Tigris, and after dinner that night, Gertrude sat down with Percy Cox, Major Eadie and Jafar Pasha for the most popular form of Baghdad evening entertainment, a game of bridge.
At Basrah, where they switched from the boat to a ship, Gertrude rushed off to see the Van Esses. A warm welcome, lunch with her friends, and the conversation turned to the rebellion still weighing heavily on their minds. For seven years John Van Ess had lived as a missionary among the Euphrates tribes that had started the 1920 uprising; he was certain, he said, that the roots of the revolt were not in a struggle for nationalism but in a war of religion, an ongoing battle between Shiites and Sunnis. He had supported Wilson’s harshest measures and, even less to Gertrude’s liking, was a fan of Sayid Talib. Nevertheless, she appreciated hearing his analyses. “There’s no one better to talk to than Mr. Van Ess,” she wrote to Florence.
As the Mesopotamian delegation sailed to Egypt on the Hardinge, Winston Churchill walked briskly past the crowds at Victoria Station, and slipping into his private compartment on the boat train, he lighted a cigar and set to work. “I’m going to save you millions,” the Colonial Secretary had promised the press. Only a few days before he had noted to Parliament that the great success of the Allies in World War I, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent possession by the British of Palestine and Mesopotamia had pushed England into a situation of enormous responsibility. It had come at a high price, he told them: twenty-five million pounds just to fight the rebellions and ward off anarchy and chaos in the Mandates. Now he would do something to cut the cost. He would establish an Arab Government in Mesopotamia and ease the burden on the British public.
Gertrude stood in her striped silk dress and silver fox boa, looking out from beneath her flowered hat, and in the hall of the familiar Cairo train station she spotted her old chum Lawrence, come to meet them. With the huge success of Lowell Thomas’s lectures and the publication of Thomas’s book, Lawrence of Arabia, T.E.L. had become world famous; for the first time since they met, he was more well known than Gertrude. “Dear Boy,” she cried out, extending her gloved hand to the shy and awkward fellow. “Gertie,” he greeted her and looked around. “Everyone Middle East is here,” he said.
A horse-drawn carriage took them to the palm-fringed Corniche, the road overlooking the Nile, and on the way they could hear Islamic students from al Ahzar University chanting anti-British slogans. Inside the Semiramis Hotel, a sense of expectation fluttered through the lobby. For days the staff had bustled about, feve
rishly polishing brass, watering potted palm trees and flowering plants, readying rooms, scurrying across the marble floors delivering telegrams, carrying hatboxes, toiletry cases and steamer trunks, ushering in a glittering array of distinguished guests.
Gertrude led Lawrence to her room. During the 1920 uprising in Mesopotamia and the debate over the cost of the mandate, Lawrence had written letters to the British press, sometimes praising, more often condemning the work of the civil administration in Baghdad. “I’m largely in agreement,” Gertrude had written back to him at first. But as the weeks wore on, his criticism grew more hostile. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour,” he wrote unfairly in The Sunday Times. “Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” Gertrude responded angrily, rightly describing his ideas as “tosh” and “pure nonsense.” Now the pair enjoyed “a private laugh over two of her letters, one,” Lawrence explained, “describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil.”
They discussed the costs of Mesopotamia and the need to withdraw some troops, and they agreed that, with an Arab Government installed, Great Britain could begin to decrease the size and expenditures of its administration. Most important of all, in the confines of the Semiramis Hotel they conspired over Faisal as the future ruler of Iraq. Lawrence had already smoothed the way with Churchill in London, and Gertrude had done the same with Cox in Baghdad; now they would work together to make sure the man they wanted was anointed Emir. An hour later they emerged from her room, and while Lawrence drifted off, Gertrude went with Sir Percy to pay a courtesy call on the Churchills. The following day, Saturday, March 12, 1921, cloaked in a shroud of secrecy, with not a single word to the press, the Cairo Conference officially opened.
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