Like a chef in a Middle East kitchen, she stirred up a pungent stew, pouring in a mélange of spicy intrigues and, every so often, taking a spoonful of tantalizing power. In her own home, Arab politicians, British officials, and visiting writers like John Dos Passos of the New York Tribune, came regularly to dine. She still had her Tuesday teas for the Arab women, and with great sympathy for some, she still paid calls on the harems. After visiting the home of Daud Bey, “a worthless vicious man who spends all his money on dancing girls,” she came away in a fury. A popular figure among the British officers (due to his skill at polo), Daud was a far less popular man in his own home. Although by Muhammadan law the women in his family had a right to a share of his property, he refused to give either his mother or his nine beautiful sisters any money to spend. After hearing the women’s story, Gertrude summoned Daud. He cringed and bristled as she told him what she thought of him, but to her satisfaction, he eventually caved in. “Muslim women who never go out of the house and see no one are absolutely helpless in the face of their menfolk,” she chafed, “and there’s such a feeling against interfering in a man’s domestic affairs that no one does anything to help. I am in the strong position of being a woman so that I can go and see the women and take their part. But how I do hate Islam!”
Not all her visits to Arab women were gloomy. She enjoyed showing them how to dress in the European style, and once in a while she took it upon herself to teach a child, such as the daughter of Musa Chalabi, to read English, or to train some youngsters to sing. Gathering them together in a quivering chorus, she pounded out the melody on an old piano. “Open those mouths! Exaggerate the sounds! Louder! Louder!” she ordered. And standing like shaking leaves, the Arab children sang out “God Save The King.”
Gunshots in the north soon shattered the autumn air. Promises had been made to the Kurds that a republic would be established after the war, but with no formal treaty yet signed between Britain and Turkey, Kurdish activists were inciting their tribes to rebel. The Sunni Kurds made up one fifth of the Iraqi population, and if the new state of Iraq was to succeed, Gertrude believed it had to include the oil-rich region of Mosul and the grain-growing areas of Tikrit and Kirkuk. Nor could an independent Kurdistan survive; economically, the Kurds could not afford to exist alone and the British could not afford to defend them. “We haven’t a penny to spend in furthering Kurdish independence,” she insisted, “for if we encourage them we shall only have to abandon them in the hour of need, which would be the worst thing possible.”
In October 1921, after Faisal made a tour of the Mosul area, he came back to Baghdad convinced that he had won the loyalty of the Kurds. “On both sides a feeling of personal confidence has been established,” Gertrude wrote to her father. “That’s exactly what one wants to see, the establishment of mutual confidence between the King and his subjects.”
But an international conference was soon to be held in Lausanne to settle the issue of Mosul, and once again the natives started skirmishing. Pro-Turkish Kurds were trying to reclaim the territory for Turkey before the meeting took place. As an ethnic (non-Arab) group, the Kurds felt more allied to Persia and Turkey, with their large Kurdish populations, than to Iraq and its Arabs. Yet as Sunni Muslims, they were essential to Faisal’s kingdom, helping to balance the scale with the Shiites.
Smelling trouble, on November 3 Gertrude took the train north. “Kirkuk,” she said, “has refused rudely to swear allegiance to Faisal.” Half its population was Kurdish and the other half Turkish and, the latter wanted to restore their ties to Turkey. But, she noted, “since Kirkuk is in the middle of Iraq, [it] can’t be countenanced.” She would brook no nonsense, and urging Sir Percy to send a message to the instigators, she advised: “We must regretfully inform them that if they come they’ll have the warmest welcome they ever met with. The guns they’ve heard; the Levies are ready and behind them aeroplanes enough to obscure the light of the sun.”
Adding to the instability in Iraq was the dispute over the southern border. After years of menacing raids, Ibn Saud had finally struck and captured Hayil, the home of Ibn Rashid. Angry Shammar tribesmen stuffed their camel bags with revenge as they fled north, seeking refuge with the Anazeh. Border raids blazed the sand as Ibn Saud threatened not only Faisal in Iraq, but his brother Abdullah in TransJordan and his father, Sharif Hussein, in Mecca. “The underlying bitterness between him and the Sharifian family baffles description,” Gertrude observed.
Sir Percy Cox wanted a conference to clarify which tribes and lands belonged to Ibn Saud in Arabia and which to Faisal in Iraq. The frontier still needed to be clearly defined, and Gertrude spent time poring over a map, plotting the water wells claimed by the Shammar and those claimed by the Anazeh, drawing the boundary lines with Arabia. Seated beside her in the office were an Arab from Hayil and her favorite chieftain, Fahad Bey: “The latter’s belief in my knowledge of the desert makes me blush,” she chirped. “When he was asked by Mr. Cornwallis to define his tribal boundaries all he said was: ‘You ask the Khatun. She knows.’ ”
She stood at the pinnacle of her power. Yet as she peered out at the lofty vista, she could feel the earth beneath her beginning to slide. “I think I have been of some use here but I suspect I’ve come very near the end of it,” she confided to Hugh. “I often wonder whether I am right to stay here.” For the moment, however, she faced an enormous amount of work. A treaty of alliance between Britain and Iraq remained to be signed, but the issue of the mandate smeared the paper.
The British tied the treaty to the mandate they had received from the League of Nations; the Arabs saw the treaty as a means of breaking the humiliating mandate. Winston Churchill, then the Colonial Secretary, intended to hold on to British influence as long as possible, and the treaty was a subterfuge for keeping control. The pact would give the British almost complete authority over the financial and foreign affairs of the infant Iraqi state. But to the Arabs, the treaty represented a way of breaking loose, of gaining their honor, of restoring their pride, of establishing their independence. As King, Faisal intended to make Iraq an equal of England. If and when a treaty was signed, he wanted it to supersede the mandate.
Encouraged to seek independence by the United States, which had never recognized the mandate and wanted, in part, to reap its own financial rewards from the Arabs, the Iraqis would put up a strong fight against the mandate. “Oil is the trouble of course—detestable stuff,” Gertrude complained.
The path was hardly smooth, she wrote to a friend: “You know well enough that to travel along any oriental road at present is a breathless adventure. The worst stumbling blocks are however of our making—broken promises, impossible and therefore unratified treaties, mandates. It’s the last which touches us most here.
“From the very beginning,” she explained, “the King told us with complete frankness that he would fight the mandate to the death. His reason is obvious. He wants to prove to the world of Islam which is bitterly anti-British that in accepting the British help he has not sacrificed the independence of an Arab state—that he has gained that which he has already told the world he could gain through free and equal alliance with us.”
A thorn in everyone’s side, the mandate nettled the feelings of Iraqis and British alike, causing the entire relationship to come into question. As confidante of the King and close adviser to Cox, the Khatun was entrusted with the secrets of both. But when her love for Iraq clashed with her pride in the Empire, she remained on the side of her motherland, England. Despite her objections to the mandate, she recognized the need for British officials to toe the line. “We had no alternative,” she acknowledged. “We have told the King that under our instructions we must point out to him that he has only two courses. One is to reject the treaty with its underlying mandate, in which case we go; the other is to accept it and with it our help.”
Whatever rumblings shook the ground between Iraq and Britain, for now the bond between Gertrude and Faisal remained strong. “I can’t tell you ho
w delightful our relations are,” she wrote glowingly, “an affectionate confidence which I don’t think could well be shaken. He usually addresses me with ‘Oh my sister’ which makes me feel like someone in the Arabian Nights. He is of course an exceptional beguiler—everyone falls under the charm—and his extremely subtle and quick intelligence is backed by a real nobility of purpose of which I’m always conscious.”
Chatting one afternoon with the King, Gertrude let drop that she planned to go home the next summer. “You’re not to talk of going home,” Faisal replied severely; “your home is here. You may say you are going to see your father.” Despite his sharp tone, his words pleased her; her fear of not being needed seemed premature. And adding color to her blush was the budding of a new romance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ken
Aman of Olympian height, with an outsized nose and piercing blue eyes, Kinahan Cornwallis had the strong looks and keen mind that Gertrude found attractive. Like her, he had been at Oxford, making his mark in athletics as well as in academics, and like her, he had been attached to the Arab Bureau, serving first as liaison to the Sharif Hussein and his son Faisal, and then as chief of the Cairo Intelligence office. He spoke in a slow, gruff voice, exhibited a quiet manner and evidenced a leadership that inspired trust. He was “forged from one of those incredible metals with a melting point of thousands of degrees,” Lawrence described him; “he could remain for months hotter than other men’s white-heat, and yet look cold and hard.” For Gertrude, he was “a tower of strength and wisdom,” who bore the triumph of the Arabs over the Turks, of practicality over pipe dreams, of wisdom over whim. If she was the romantic breeze, he was the steady rock.
Personal Adviser to the King and Chief Adviser in the Ministry of the Interior, Kinahan Cornwallis was the only other British official besides Gertrude in whom Faisal had great confidence. The two had been placed side by side, supporting stakes behind the sapling King.
“He seems to me so wise and unacademic in his appreciation of the Arab point of view,” Gertrude wrote in describing Cornwallis to Hugh. “I hope it’s not because he and I see eye to eye that I rate his discernment so highly!” Thousands of miles from his wife and children, he had separated himself from his family, not just by geographic distance but by environment and emotion. As it had for Gertrude, Iraq had become the central place, the central point in his life. Peering together through the same camera lens, she and Cornwallis focused on a similar picture.
On an afternoon when she invited him to tea, Gertrude sought his advice. Should she stay on in Iraq? she asked him anxiously. Sir Percy would be retiring in a year; after that, what role did he think she would play? And would she have a role at all? she wondered. Cornwallis replied in a steady voice, his calm demeanor a rock for her to lean on. They were the only two people in the foreign service of Iraq who had no ulterior objective, he said. Nothing but real necessity ought to call her away. Cheered by his confidence, she put aside her fears and finished her tea.
A gloomy letter from England about her father’s declining fortune, and a bout of appendicitis suffered in Baghdad by Faisal, gave a damp start to the year of 1922, but the knowledge that her job was secure, at least until Sir Percy retired in 1923, and that she had the intimate confidence of Faisal and a growing friendship with Cornwallis, kept her spirits buoyed. By early spring her garden bloomed with daffodils, marigolds and wallflowers, her cook was serving up platters of ripened truffles and her wardrobe was replenished with new dresses and cloaks from home. And in February a parcel from England landed on her desk, and when she quickly tore it open, a diamond tiara rolled out. “I nearly laughed aloud,” she wrote to Florence, “it was such an unexpected object in the middle of the office files. But it’s too kind of you to let me have it. I’d forgotten how fine it was. I fear in wearing it I may be taken for the crowned Queen of Mesopotamia.”
To Hugh she wrote euphorically: “I want to tell you, just you, who know and understand everything, that I’m acutely conscious of how much life has given me. I’ve gone back now to the wild feeling of joy in existence—I’m happy in feeling that I’ve got the love and confidence of a whole nation, a very wonderful and absorbing thing—almost too absorbing perhaps. You must forgive me if it seems to preoccupy me too much—it doesn’t really divide me from you, for one of the greatest pleasures is to tell you all about it, in the certainty that you will sympathise. I don’t for a moment suppose that I can make much difference to our ultimate relations with the Arabs and with Asia, but for the time I’m one of the factors in the game.” She did not mention Cornwallis, but his affection underscored her joy.
Thinking back to the lost opportunities for marriage and children, she added pensively, “I remember your saying to me once that the older one grows the more one lives in other people’s lives. Well, I’ve got plenty of lives to live in, haven’t I? And perhaps, after all, it has been best this way. At any rate, as it had to be this way, I don’t now regret it.”
Neither the Cabinet’s dismissal by Faisal, who had lost his patience with all the Ministers, nor a suspicious meeting in Karbala of the sheikhs and holy men, could shake her spirits. Her father was coming out to Jerusalem, and on the morning of April 29, 1922, Gertrude drove to the Baghdad airstrip. Skirting the rules against female passengers—“I’m an officer and I’m sexless,”—she climbed aboard one of the two British air force mail planes flying to TransJordan. From there she had hoped to travel with Hugh to Damascus, but the situation had become too dangerous. Even the flight to Amman was risky, she explained. “It’s clear that any journey of mine in Syria would be classed in their Criminal Investigation reports under the heading of Movements of Suspects.… Anyway I expect Father and I will be happy even if he has to come and hold my hand while I’m sitting in gaol!” Ironically, it was near Amman that the Turkish authorities had tried to stop her in 1914 on her way to Arabia, the very trip that had led to her imprisonment in Hayil and to her Intelligence work in Iraq.
After three weeks of travel through TransJordan, Palestine and Lebanon, Gertrude took leave of her father and headed home. On the six-hour flight to Baghdad, while the plane, battered by a north wind, sped at one hundred miles an hour, Gertrude stared out the window, following tire tracks in the sand, keeping count of the landing sites so that she would know where they were. “I fear I’ve become the confirmed aviator,” she announced after the plane touched down.
Faisal welcomed her back with an invitation to tea. Telling him what he wanted to hear, she reported how poorly the French were doing in Syria: their officials spoke no Arabic, had no personal relationships with the Arabs, and patrolled the streets with soldiers, “in deadly fear of an uprising.” She was convinced that Iraq was “the only Arab province set in the right path.”
The King asked her advice on an ultimatum he had received from Churchill. The Arab Government must accept the fact that in order to have the treaty of independence, they would have to accept the mandate, Churchill said, even though it guaranteed British control. If Iraq refused to accept those conditions, the Colonial Secretary announced, the British would pull out by Christmas. There seemed little choice but to go along with Churchill’s demands.
A short while later the King admitted that he owed his throne to the British and needed their protection; if they withdrew from Iraq, his Arab opponents would overthrow him. What’s more, the country would be eaten alive, the carcass torn apart by townsmen, tribesmen, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Turks all fighting for a piece of the territory.
Almost as soon as Faisal declared his consent, he changed his mind. Under pressure from the nationalists, he announced his willingness to sign the treaty, but only if it had equal status with, and was not subordinate to, the mandate. Iraq should be seen as an equal partner with Britain, he insisted, and he called for total abrogation of the mandate. But Churchill gave a brusque reply: Britain could conclude a treaty only with a mandate; that was the status given Iraq by the League of Nations under international la
w.
When a group of extremists held a demonstration against the British, Faisal refused to stop them, even showing support for the most radical of the nationalists. The Khatun had learned that, among his advisers, some had been trying to persuade him to declare himself an independent Islamic king; if he did, they assured him, the whole country would fall in line. Now he was succumbing to their advice. “The country will rally round him,” Gertrude had written Hugh, “but not because of a sudden and miraculous change of heart. What is needed is several years of stability and decent government, not a miracle but a reward earned by steady work.”
For more than a year she had struggled to make Faisal king, and now he was not merely destroying her work; he was destroying the special bond between England and Iraq. It was only with British support that Faisal could stay on the throne, and it was only through Faisal that the British could maintain their influence. Turning to Mr. Cornwallis, “her great standby,” as she called him, she discovered that, like her, he too was “feeling bitterly disillusioned.”
Distraught over Faisal’s bias toward the extremists, she decided to tell him exactly how she felt. When an invitation came for tea on June 4, 1922, she put on her dress and hat and steeled herself for a confrontation. Waves of heat rose off the ground as she made her way to the palace, and on the streets, sweat poured off the brows of men and animals. In the whitewashed reception room of the King’s house, the electric ceiling fans whirred with agitation. Faisal appeared, dramatic with his dark eyes and white robes, and when he welcomed her, she curtsied, but as she lowered her body, her eyes glowered angrily. Beneath the gracious formalities, she knew that Faisal knew how enraged she was. “I am playing my last card,” she told him flatly. Did he believe in her personal sincerity and devotion to him? she asked.
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