Early the same morning Gertrude joined the King and Cornwallis for a breakfast outing near Baquba. After picnicking at a long table under the fruit trees in Fakhri Bey’s garden, she and Ken slipped off together to walk among the orchards, fertile grounds filled with vineyards and groves of oranges and dates. They watched the peasants gathering pomegranates, and they lay together on the river bank looking up at the poplar leaves against the sky. “As far as I was concerned, Fakhri’s garden might well have been the gardens of paradise,” she wrote later. They lunched with the King, nineteen regal courses, and in the afternoon she and Ken broke off from the others, just the two of them motoring home across the desert, putting up coveys of grouse and shooting them, laughing together when twice their tires were punctured. They returned to Baghdad just after sunset, “drunk with sun and air.” It was years since she had described a day with a man so joyously. The languid pleasure of a picnic and the exuberant ride through the desert harked back to her youthful days with Henry Cadogan.
With more time now for socializing, she filled her calendar with dates with Ken Cornwallis and the King. Dinners and bridge games with Faisal (which he was always allowed to win), teas and tennis matches at the palace, races on Saturdays, rides through the palm gardens and, on Sundays, after a swim, intimate dinners at home with Ken.
There were her obligations as head of the Salam Library (she was, she noted, the only European ever elected); social calls on the Arab women, teaching them how to dress in fashionable French clothes; establishing an Iraqi branch of the Red Cross; and always more teas. Sati el Husari, chief aide to the Minister of Education, arrived with his wife and niece, and Gertrude welcomed them to her drawing room. Plopping a box of chocolates and some fashion magazines in front of her female guests, she quickly turned to talk to Sati. But after a while, his Turkish wife looked at her with disgust, and, to Gertrude’s surprise, in fluent English announced, “The next time you want to talk to my husband, you don’t need to invite me.” With that, Gertrude apologized and turned more hospitable.
Aside from her duties as the newly appointed honorary Director of Antiquities, her political workload declined. After a series of attacks by Kurdish rebels in the north, however, and counterattacks by the British air force, she set off to inspect the region. London was eager to solve the problem by creating a separate area of Kurdistan, but besides the fact that there was no defensible border between the two areas, “from the King downwards,” she observed before she left, “we all know, as they know at home also, that the Arab state cannot exist without the northern province. Baghdad is too closely dependent on Mosul.”
After investigating the situation among the local Armenians, Christians and Kurds, and after meeting with almost every important sheikh, holy man and notable, she returned to Baghdad on November 16, 1922, convinced that if the area was kept out of Turkish hands, the Kurds would become loyal citizens of Iraq.
The situation in Mosul was also of concern to Cox, but his long delayed border conference with Ibn Saud was about to take place, and by the time Gertrude came back to Baghdad, the High Commissioner was preparing to leave. She yearned to join him, but Ibn Saud had shown no fondness for her—too strong a woman for the chauvinist male—and for years Cox himself had nurtured the Arabian Sultan. Instead, it was Major Dickson and Major More, Sabih Bey, the Minister of the Interior, and Fahad Bey of the Anazeh who packed their dinner jackets and accompanied Cox as he set off on November 19 to sign a treaty.
Sir Percy had known Ibn Saud since the British official began his duties in the Gulf, and for eighteen years he had remained father figure, friend and financier to the Wahhabi leader. As Cox sailed toward Ojair, near Bahrain, Ibn Saud’s slaves prepared for his arrival. Lavish white tents of various sizes were pitched in the sand for sleeping, bathing, dining and entertaining; thick carpets were laid, luxurious furnishings installed and ample supplies of fresh fruits, Perrier water, Cuban cigars and Johnny Walker Scotch were stocked for Kokus.
The negotiations over the boundary lines went on for five days and nights while Cox, dressed in his suit, bow tie and felt fedora, served as a mediator between the robed representatives of Iraq, Kuwait and Arabia. Ibn Saud demanded that the borders be based on tribes, not territory, and according to his scheme, two groups—Fahad Bey’s Anazeh and part of the Shammar—would belong to Arabia, regardless of how far north they traveled. The two tribes would become a movable border, expanding and contracting, adjusting as they searched for grazing grounds; the border would change according to their nomadic needs. “East is East and West is West,” Kipling had written, and the two were never farther apart. To Cox and the British, the notion of property revolved around territory, but for Ibn Saud and the Bedouin, the idea of property was tied to people.
No progress could possibly be made, and by the sixth day Sir Percy lost his temper. With only Major Dickson at the meeting, he berated Ibn Saud as if he were a schoolboy. At the rate that both sides were going, he told the perfumed Arabian ruler, nothing would be settled for a year. Ibn Saud was on the verge of tears; Sir Percy Cox was his father and mother, he cried, the one who had made him and raised him from nothing to the position he held. He would surrender “half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered.”
With that, Sir Percy took hold of the map. Carefully drawing a red line across the face of it, he assigned a chunk of the Nejd to Iraq; then, to placate Ibn Saud, he took almost two thirds of the territory of Kuwait and gave it to Arabia. Last, drawing two zones, and declaring that they should be neutral, he called one the Kuwait Neutral Zone and the other the Iraq Neutral Zone. When a representative of Ibn Saud pressed Cox not to make a Kuwait Neutral Zone, Sir Percy asked him why. “Quite candidly,” the man answered, “because we think oil exists there.” “That,” replied the High Commissioner, “is exactly why I have made it a neutral zone. Each side shall have a half-share.” The agreement, signed by all three sides at the beginning of December 1922, confirmed the boundary lines drawn so carefully by Gertrude Bell. But for seventy years, up until and including the 1990 Gulf War involving Iraq and Kuwait, the dispute over the borders would continue.
“Do you know,” Gertrude wrote to Hugh toward the end of 1922, “a propos of nothing at all—that I’ve been four times mentioned in dispatches for my valuable and distinguished services in the files! It came to me as a surprise—indeed it is singularly preposterous—when I counted up the documents in order to fill up a Colonial Office Form. I hadn’t realised there were so many.” At a recent Arab ladies’ tea party she had asked, “Who is the smartest lady in Baghdad?” “You, of course,” the women replied, and her face beamed with pleasure. But as much recognition as she still received, Gertrude felt that her importance had already begun to diminish. By mid-December she had finished her yearly report for the Secretary of State, observing ruefully, “I seem to have done singularly little of interest.” Her power lay in the strength of the British presence, and as the Arab Government took hold, her influence slipped even further. Although her friendship with the King continued, he no longer needed her as his liaison to the High Commissioner. Her role was changing from political counselor to personal companion.
A Christmas trip along the Euphrates with Ken Cornwallis and two other British officers served as a pleasant holiday respite, and, returning at the end of the month, she was not unhappy to find a pile of reports to write for Cox. “The fact remains,” she stated, “that whatever I may do in the future, I shall never have a chief whom I serve more wholeheartedly than I serve him.” Sir Percy was due to retire within a few months, but in preparation for that, he was returning to England to help conclude the government’s peace with Turkey and its policy on Iraq. With the Turks threatening to invade, Cox was determined to see that Britain did not desert its friend. Britain had gone to Mesopotamia in 1914 to protect its oil fields, its trade and its interests in the Persian Gulf, Cox would remind the Cabinet committee, and if it withdrew from Iraq now, it might lose all that it had set out to preserv
e. “There is, remember, no defensible frontier between Mosul and Baghdad, and if the Turks take Baghdad will they not aim at taking Basrah too?” he would ask. “A bad peace will be more costly than our present responsiblities since it will compel us to take special military measures in our own defence.”
Before Cox left for England he appointed Henry Dobbs as his deputy, and in early January Gertrude gave a dinner at home to introduce Dobbs to her colleague Nigel Davidson, the Judiciary Adviser, and to her intimate friend Ken Cornwallis, the King’s Adviser. The conversation focused on the Kurdish dilemma, which would continue long after the British left the scene. The Turks had denied the Kurdish claims for independence, while Faisal had indicated he would favor an autonomous Kurdish government within the boundaries of Iraq as long as the Kurds were tied economically and politically to Iraq (a position taken years later by Saddam Hussein). Faisal’s words had served to quell the insurgents, but a few weeks later Dobbs, concerned about new attacks, sent troops to the northern border to discourage Turkish aggression, and the King sent his younger brother Zaid to set up a royal household in Mosul, hoping to win the Kurds to the Iraqi side. In the meantime, an international conference, convening in Lausanne, would take up the Kurdish claim to independence.
There was little that Gertrude could do about Mosul, and she turned her attention to archaeology. A group from Chicago’s Field Museum had come to work at Kish, and a joint team had arrived from the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to excavate at Ur. As Honorary Director of Archaeology, Gertrude took great interest in inspecting the sites. The ancient Sumerian city of Ur, biblical birthplace of Abraham, had flourished nearly six thousand years earlier, and its mound would yield archaeological riches for years of digging to come. The excavation would produce every aspect of Sumerian life, from the ziggurats—the staggered staircased towers of 2000 B.C.—to the thin, curved canoes still being made to cross the marshes, to the most spectacular treasures in the Royal Tombs: golden statuettes, golden headdresses, golden daggers hilted in lapis lazuli, copper vases and cuneiform tablets. Seeing the excavation even in its early stages, she said, was the most thrilling sensation she had ever experienced in archaeology. Most important, under the law of excavation drawn up by Gertrude Bell, Iraq would be protected from being robbed of its ancient wealth.
In Baghdad that early spring, she busied herself with furnishings for the King’s new palace and with receptions for Sir Percy Cox. He had pushed up his retirement to May, and although it was Ramadan, the month of April swirled with a rush of farewell parties. From Haji Naji to the King, from the Indian bazaar merchants to the Royal Air Force, everyone seemed eager to host an event for the High Commissioner. Finally, on May 1, 1923, the Coxes waved goodbye. It was a sad moment for Gertrude. “I’m rather overcome with departure,” she confessed with a heavy heart. “Sir Percy left, a very moving farewell.”
He had been the most significant figure in her life for nearly seven years; the Arabs thought the world of him and called him “foxy,” but to her he was so much more; he was wise, caring and calm, a father figure and a friend, the one person in the East she could count on in troubled times. He understood her point of view, appreciated her tireless efforts, admired her abilities. He had accepted her when she first arrived in Basrah in 1916; welcomed her to join his office in Baghdad despite the objections of General Maude; relied completely on her Intelligence work with the Arabs during and after the war; defended her against A. T. Wilson’s tirades; valued her knowledge of archaeology; and always, always treated her with respect. And she was devoted to him. “I think no Englishman has inspired more confidence in the East,” she said. No Englishman except her father inspired more confidence in her. Her mentor had gone, and as Gertrude prepared warily for her own vacation at home, she felt unsure of the welcome she would receive when she returned to Baghdad in the fall.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Troubles
It was a smaller Rounton that Gertrude returned to in June 1923; not the omnipotent universe as viewed through a child’s eyes, but the dwarfed and vulnerable world that an adult discerns. The shifting needs of twentieth-century industry, the great postwar Depression and the searing costs of labor strikes had taken their toll. The Bell family fortune was slipping away. In order to keep the costs down, part of the house had been closed off, some of the staff had been let go and a frugal accounting was being kept of all expenses. Gertrude’s own world, too, was slipping away, and even as she sat for her portrait by John Singer Sargent or corresponded with T. E. Lawrence about the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, she pondered her future. Percy Cox’s retirement had left her feeling at loose ends. She had known his successor, Henry Dobbs, from the early days of the war when, as Revenue Commissioner at Basrah, he had shared her dislike for A. T. Wilson. But unlike Cox, Dobbs was neither her mentor nor a master statesman. Not that such a man was needed anymore in Iraq. The reins of government were resting more firmly in the hands of the Arabs.
Another matter also weighed on her mind. Her frequent dealings with Faisal had nudged her closer to his trusted adviser, Cornwallis. She and Ken sympathized with each other’s frustrations and strategized over their plans. As they worked together in stride, pushing the King along the path to power, her admiration for Ken had begun to blossom into something more. His tall, lean frame, his moral strength, his gentle manner appealed to her sensibilities. She not only sought his advice; she yearned for his company and hungered for his love. At Rounton, strolling across the fields with a family friend, she compared Cornwallis to Doughty-Wylie. There would never be another man like Dick, she stressed, nor any correspondence that could ever soar to the level of passion theirs had attained. But Dick was gone; Ken was alive and vital. He was seventeen years her junior, and he had sparked the fire that lay in embers inside her.
Henry Dobbs was pleasant and amiable, much easier to talk to than Percy Cox, Gertrude reported in September, soon after her plane touched down at Baghdad. “Yes, the atmosphere of the Residency has undergone a remarkable change,” she noted. “If we haven’t Sir Percy’s wisdom, neither have we Lady Cox’s folly and Sir Henry brings a geniality of his own. Sir Hon-ri, the Arabs call him.”
Gertrude’s life, too, was undergoing change. Instead of toiling for endless hours at the office, she fluttered around the palace arranging the English furniture she had ordered from London, despairing over the fake French antiques commissioned by someone else, still devising a heraldic coat of arms for the King. She hosted evenings for Ken or the King, fretted over Cornwallis’s well-being and stood near Faisal as he cut the ribbon on the new train line leading to Karbala. She attended shooting parties and polo matches, engaged in tennis matches, bridge games, mah jong, chemin de fer, luncheons and teas, and shared dinners almost every evening with Ken. And when Ken moved into a new house, Gertrude spent the whole Sunday helping him arrange his belongings. “My existence is one of prolonged gaiety,” she announced giddily at the end of November 1923.
Even Christmas, so often tinged with sadness, became a glorious time once again as she and Ken took off with friends for a week of hunting at Babylon. Before they left, the maid Marie, as she packed Gertrude’s riding habits and evening clothes, insisted on including her prettiest pink crêpe de Chine nightgown. “But why?” Gertrude asked. “It’s a shooting party.” Yes, said her maid, but Ken’s Sudanese servant would see them. Perhaps Marie thought he would describe the gown to Ken, or perhaps she thought there was something more; that not only his servant but Ken himself might see the nightgown. And then, after six days of relaxation and archaeological visits, Gertrude returned contentedly and announced, “I think no more delightful expedition has ever been made in Iraq.”
Despite her cheerfulness, her waning power was evident, and indeed crudely described by a railway official. In a letter to St. John Philby, the functionary wrote: “Certain it is that the ‘uncrowned queen’ is no longer first and last in the land; just where she gets off is uncertain, unless in
an advisory capacity of dishing out concessions to a bevy of tell-tale tel diggers from all continents and countries.”
Unlike Cox, Dobbs neither asked for her advice nor allowed her to initiate actions on her own, and it wasn’t long after her return from the trip that ennui set in. Her thoughts drifted back to the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and, daydreaming about a future empire ruled by Faisal, her attentions shifted again to antiquities. In early January 1924, when the dreaded cold weather had dampened her spirits even more, she sat in her office, shivering and wrapped in a fur coat, and fancied a visit to Kish and Ur. On the way down, she planned to take a jaunt by herself in the desert. “I want to feel savage and independent again,” she declared.
The brief but adventurous journey revived her mood. She and her assistant, J. M. Wilson, had hardly driven very far when the front wheel of their car crossed over the edge of a narrow bridge and nearly fell into a canal. As they motored on, the car slid more out of control, and by the time they reached an open plain it spun around like a top. Her assistant refused to risk his life any further. It had started to rain, but she and Wilson pulled up their boots, plunged into the mud and, after trudging for more than an hour, reached the site of Kish. Mr. Mackay, the archaeologist, was waiting, and they spent the rest of the evening looking at his finds. With her baggage left behind in the car, she had only a cake of soap, a borrowed hairbrush and someone else’s pyjamas. But it didn’t matter. She went to bed in her tent and slept soundly, content to be in the desert.
The next day she set off on her own. Arriving at Warka, once the Sumerian city of Uruk, the Babylonian capital of the south, she found the archaeological mound thick with natives scavenging for treasure. Rounding up the Arabs, she asked sternly, amid their screams of fear, “Have you any anticas?”
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