by Alan Gold
Gertrude interrupted Lawrence, terrified that his lack of subtlety would imperil their mission. Looking at Captain Lawrence sternly, she said to Sir Henry, “I’m afraid what Captain Lawrence is telling you about the intelligence we’ve received is quite correct. Word came yesterday about the difficulties which Hardinge’s troops are experiencing, Henry. The British Indian army is pushing northwards up the Tigris valley towards Kut and Baghdad and even though they had a lot of victories after they took Basrah on the Persian Gulf, they’re beginning to encounter very real difficulties. They’re bogged down in the marshes of the Shatt al Arab waterway, they’ve got insufficient equipment, and a shortage of boats to navigate up the Tigris, and the Arabs are taking pot-shots and stealing their food and equipment. Taking Basrah was fairly easy because it was largely a sea-born assault. But right now our boys are in the land of the Arab . . . sand and salt and marshes . . . and they’re going to find that things will soon start to go very badly for them.”
Sir Henry frowned, and shook his head. “But I don’t understand. Taking Basrah was a triumph. Hardinge said it was the turning point in the war. Why should we suffer a reversal?”
“You have no idea of the dangers of what lies ahead for them,” Gertrude replied. “You see, Hardinge’s men are experienced fighting in the mountainous terrain and jungles of India, not in the deserts of Mesopotamia or in the marshes of the Shatt al Arab waterway. They’re heading into disaster marching northwards up the Tigris towards Baghdad. The Turks are encamped in huge numbers along the way. By the time they reach their destination, the Turks will be in plague proportions south of Baghdad. I pray that my fears are unfounded, but I feel it important that you advise Lord Hardinge of this immediately. Tell him to halt any forward march northwards from the Gulf of Persia to Baghdad until they’re fully reinforced and they have sufficient boats and horses and even medical people on the ground. If they go northwards half-cocked just because they found Basrah easy pickings, they’re heading into the jaws of a terrible battle. My information comes from an extremely reliable source,” said Gertrude.
Sir Henry listened carefully, but said, “While I might accept your information, and pray that you’re wrong, I’m afraid Charles Hardinge isn’t about to listen to any information from you Arabists here in Cairo. I’ve just received a copy of a letter he’s sent to the Foreign Office, saying that the creation of an Arab revolt is detrimental to British interests in the Middle East. He’s put the cat amongst the pigeons, I’m afraid.”
“Why the hell did he do such a stupid thing as that?” asked Gertrude. “We’re on the spot . . . we’re the ones who know what’s happening . . . he’s in India, for God’s sake. Oh, this is really too much. What did the Foreign Office say in response?” she asked.
“They haven’t formulated a response yet, but the point is more what this will mean for our participation in the war effort.”
A servant, dressed in a long striped galabiyah, appeared as though from nowhere, and deposited tall frosted glasses of fresh lemonade on the table in front of them. It was a welcome relief from the heat of the day and the tepid water which had been there on their arrival. And it was also a relief from the tension in the air. They all waited in silence for the servant to bow and then disappear back into the house.
“Look,” Sir Henry said after seeming to consider his words with great care, “I’ve been having a lot of communications from the War Office in London. They’re sending out a chappie called David Hogarth to run the Arab Office here in Egypt . . . well, I suppose it’s alright to inform you that they’re changing the name from Arab Office to Arab Bureau to impress people with how much importance they place upon the future of the Arab revolt against the Turks. But chappies I know in Whitehall tell me that London’s decision will be to fight Hardinge tooth and nail. And knowing him, he’ll see it as an attempt to diminish his empire . . .”
“His empire?” asked Lawrence.
“You know what I mean, Captain Lawrence. The point is the British Government of India wants to annex Mesopotamia and claim it as its own. Right now, and I don’t want this to go beyond the two of you, we in Cairo and Hardinge in Delhi are at loggerheads. It’s not just intemperate telegrams, Gertrude; it’s nasty reports back to London. I told you Hardinge was my friend. He once was, but now we’ve become bitter rivals instead of fighting for the same cause. Hardinge and the Indian government are perfectly happy for us to be in charge of Egypt and the Sudan, but they’re insistent on keeping control of all the emirates and sheikhdoms in the Gulf. They seem to think Arabia can be run from the Sub-Continent and that they should control and rule the Middle East . . .”
Gertrude gasped. “But that’s insane. That’s just boneheaded stupidity. What does Delhi think it knows about the Arabs? Absolutely bloody nothing. Nothing at all. They’re only doing it because they want to control the wealth which will come from Persian and Arab oil.”
“I know,” Sir Henry insisted. “But that doesn’t stop them wanting to control it. They want to annex Mesopotamia, which will cost London an absolute fortune. They’ll have to station a huge permanent army there to keep the Arabs down, and have all the infrastructure of government and the civil service.
“We in the Arab Bureau, on the other hand, want an affiliation in an Arab kingdom which extends from Arabia to Mesopotamia and over which we can exert a sort of covert and well-concealed control. Hardinge says that unless we annex Basrah and Abadan and Baghdad, we’ll lose control of any oil which might be found, and then our ships and armed forces and industry will be subject to the will of an Arab leader.”
Thomas Lawrence put his glass down, and stood to straighten his back. He walked over to a pomegranate tree, and smelt the fragrance. “Does Lord Hardinge seriously believe that a hundred and fifty million Arabs can once again be annexed against their will? Does he think that after centuries of Ottoman repression, the Sheiks and Emirs will just meekly accept one ruler in place of another?”
“It’s up to us to persuade Lord Hardinge otherwise,” said Sir Henry. “We might think he’s wrong, but he is the Viceroy of India, and his voice is very powerful in London. And it’s made even stronger by the fact that his troops, the India Expeditionary Force, have just succeeded in taking Basrah and are about to travel up the Tigris to take Baghdad. I’m afraid what Lord Hardinge needs is to listen to the voice of reason, to hear firsthand why it would be such a terrible mistake for India to try to rule Arabia. I know you came here to talk about payments to the Sharif of the Hejaz, but this, I fear is a great deal more important. What Hardinge needs is to listen to a subtle voice, one which understands the complexities of the Arabic mind, one which is fluent in the language and customs of the people and has lived in their tents and knows how they’d react.”
He glanced over to Gertrude, who was sitting there, nursing a glass of lemonade. When she looked at him, she reacted in horror.
“Me?” she shouted. “Go to Delhi?”
Sir Henry said nothing, but merely nodded. Then he turned to Lawrence.
“And you, Lawrence, will go to Arabia and carry our message to Prince Faisal and his father.”
SEVEN
Approaching Basrah. Mesopotamia. 1916
For almost the entire journey back from India to the Middle East, the Englishwoman had been driving Gertrude crazy. As the Sub-Continent disappeared into the mist-shrouded immensity of the Indian Ocean, the woman had been firing off a mindless barrage of thoughts, observations, and prejudices, almost without respite. Be it the state of the ship, the ocean, the war, fashion, or whatever, the woman had an opinion and insisted Gertrude be made aware of her judgements. Because there was virtually no escape within the confines of a troopship, Gertrude had decided to be polite, to smile, but not to respond or confirm the woman’s narrow-mindedness or even support her prejudices by acknowledging that she was listening.
She was the wife of a Catering Corps officer, who, presumably because he could cook a roast beef without burning it, had been elevated to
some dizzy rank in the British Army. The fussy Englishwoman took great pride in explaining tirelessly to Gertrude that because her husband had once cooked a meal for the late King Edward, he had been specially selected to be stationed at Headquarters in Hyderabad where all the action was, and without him and the men in his command, the whole of the Indian Army would collapse.
The major’s awful wife had been in India for two years, and was now catching the troop transport across the Indian Ocean to Suez, where she’d take a passenger liner through the Mediterranean to reach Southampton and home. Lucky cook, Gertrude kept thinking, to be free of this awful woman for at least a couple of years.
Between Bombay and Karachi, perennially over-dressed in fashion which was at least three seasons old, with strings of pearls around her neck and an absurd hat adorning her head even at breakfast, the damnable woman had insisted on seeking out Gertrude morning, noon, and night as the only other lady on the ship. The excuse was always for them to go on a ‘perambulation’ around the decks in order to get away from the ‘dreadful and distressingly crude’ enlisted men and non-commissioned officers who were swarming over the ship bound for the Middle East to support the British Indian Army’s Expeditionary force in the assault on the Turks. And when she wasn’t complaining about the troops, she was defaming the quality and quantity of the food served on board . . . food which her husband wouldn’t serve to pigs.
So oppressive was she, Gertrude had taken to staying in her cabin, or getting up late and missing breakfast in order to avoid the boorish snob, but regardless of how she crept around the ship to avoid the major’s wife, the buxom Home County’s woman always seemed to find her.
After a number of excruciating days sailing, they were at last entering Middle East waters, approaching the head of the Gulf where the Shatt al Arab waterway emptied into the sea. The watercourse resulted from the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates as the two great rivers emptied the snows of Asiatic Turkey into the Gulf of Persia. They would put in there, unload the troops who would then go by barge to Basrah, and the ship would continue on its way to end its journey in Port Said.
Gertrude had been away from the Middle East for several months, negotiating on the orders of Sir Henry McMahon in the hope of resolving the deep-seated antipathy between the two commands in Egypt and India. And because of her practical skills as a negotiator, her visit to Delhi had been wonderfully successful. With her knowledge of the peoples of Arabia and Mesopotamia, with her understanding of the politics of the region, and with the very real concerns of the Indian Viceroy that there could be an uprising of Indian Muslims if his army sided with the Arabs against the Turks, Gertrude had convinced Lord Hardinge to support a more co-operative working relationship between Delhi and Cairo.
She’d also persuaded him that Mesopotamia could supply the British Army with vast quantities of grain, cotton, dates, figs and much more, and, when it was eventually proven, vast supplies of oil if the early geological reports were confirmed. It could be a virtual treasure house of riches, and now that she’d finally got him to understand the potential of the area for the Empire, Lord Hardinge was sending her to Basrah to be a spy for Britain’s Indian Government, his eyes and ears for Britain in the Middle East.
So excited was Gertrude at returning to the area that as the troopship left the Gulf of Oman and entered the turquoise waters of the Straits of Hormuz and then into the Persian Gulf, she had made the mistake of allowing her excitement to overcome her judgment, and stood by the railings on the upper deck, watching the nearby land glide past. And that was where the damnable woman found her.
“Ah, my dear, I see you’ve surfaced. I’ve been looking all over the boat for you.” she said coming up behind Gertrude who was surveying the huts, palm groves, and oases on the distant shore. The cook’s wife looked at what it was that was fascinating Gertrude.
“Ugh! Such a pity you emerged from your cabin after so long, only to have to look at those hovels. How can any respectable person live in a place like that,” she commented.
Gertrude had made a real effort to be polite to the major’s wife, if only by absenting herself from the woman’s presence, but this latest obscenely stupid outburst made Gertrude snap. She was furious with the comment. Something—she had no idea what—erupted inside her and an irresistible urge demanded she teach the woman a lesson. After days in the company of the dim-wit, having to listen to her tireless drivel about the importance of her cook-husband and her social standing being the wife of a major, Gertrude had forced herself to remain uncharacteristically silent until now. But being back on her home territory, her self-restraint came to a regrettable end. She turned slowly to the major’s wife, and asked simply, “Are you, by any chance, talking about those huts over there?”
“Yes, my dear! Those simply awful dwellings over there,” the major’s wife said, pointing to an encampment. “They’re hideous. They shouldn’t be allowed. I mean, really. You know, I’ll bet they’re full of flies and vermin and men and women in filthy clothes. Really! You have to wonder how they can bring their children up in those hovels.”
“But people have been living like that in this area for thousands of years . . .”
“That’s the whole point, my dear. They haven’t progressed. They’re still as primitive as they ever were. Dirty, filthy people.”
Gertrude forced herself to nod and smile. She knew she should remain silent, but a malicious sprite within her forced her to ask softly, “Would you prefer that there were zero huts like that?”
“Oh, absolutely. None at all.”
“No,” insisted Gertrude. “I asked specifically whether you’d prefer that there were zero huts like that.”
The major’s wife looked at her strangely. “Yes, absolutely. Zero huts.”
“Interesting,” Gertrude said, softly enough to be close to a whisper. “You see, we English, and indeed the rest of the world, wouldn’t have understood the concept of the zero had it not been for these people, ancestors of those filthy dirty people in those very huts over there. And without the concept of zero, mathematics couldn’t have advanced to the point it has today, absolutely central to modern scientific discoveries. It was the Arabs, living in this part of the world, in huts just like those, who invented the concept of zero, which is a dramatically difficult concept to begin to comprehend. It’s a concept which requires a huge imaginative leap, and these people did it thousands of years ago.”
“Did they?” she responded, not sure where this conversation was going. “And is that particularly important?” she asked.
“Only if you want to be able to understand the concepts of higher mathematics and any form of modern science. Oh, and another thing,” said Gertrude, “Do you think there’s a signpost with the name of that village on it?”
“I should think so.”
“So would I,” said Gertrude. “You see, without those people’s ancestors, we wouldn’t have signposts or words. Thousands of years ago, while our ancestors in what we today call Great Britain were painting themselves with woad and living in wattle and daub huts and foraging around in the ground for nuts and berries like feral animals, this wonderful civilization invented the alphabet and the written word. In fact, this area gave rise to the most imaginative and inventive people the world has ever seen. These people were the source for most of the great myths of humankind. From here came the progenitors of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From here came the stories of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark. Out of these sands grew the civilizations of Babylonia, Sumer, Akkad, and others of which you might not have heard. From living in huts like these and sitting underneath date palms and thinking great thoughts, not recipes for roast beef, poets wrote the most sublime lines, mathematicians created concepts to explain the order of the world, chemists discovered the nature of matter, geographers shaped the Earth and astronomers mapped the stars in the heavens. Indeed,” said Gertrude, looking now directly at the astonished major’s wife, “The m
an who thought up algebra might very well have come from that village over there. So first appearances can be deceptive, can’t they?” she asked.
She was about to walk away, when she couldn’t resist saying, “Britain might call itself Great, but remember the words of Sir Isaac Newton. He said, ‘If I have been privileged to see further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants’.”
Gertrude pointed to the distant shoreline. “Over there, madam, in those huts with flies and lice, might have been born some of the giants on whose shoulders Sir Isaac stood.”
Gertrude excused herself, and returned to her cabin. She sat on her bed, furious with herself for embarrassing the woman. It was intellectual snobbery at its very worst, but the major’s wife—she couldn’t even remember the damn woman’s name—was everything Gertrude detested about the British. They were so smug and self-satisfied in their arrogance at being the greatest empire the world had ever known. Yet how smug were the ancient Egyptians and the Akkadians and the Sumerians and the Mesopotamians at the height of their existence? All were the masters of the world until some other warlike tribe began flexing its muscles, or some natural phenomenon like drought or earthquake destroyed the center of government, and the periphery drifted away, to be absorbed by some other fast-rising power.
And then how great were the great civilisations when their empires began to erode? She recalled Shelly’s Ozymandias, a brilliant poem about hubris in which a traveller finds the plinth of an ancient statue, on which are written the words: