Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  She smiled at him, and said softly, “Odd, Percy. All my life, I’ve been striving for recognition of my value to Great Britain, and fighting the entrenched male establishment, not because I’m a woman, but because of what I’ve achieved. But right at this very moment, I find it hard to recognise my own country.”

  ~

  Damascus, 1918

  Lowell Thomas stood on the hilltop overlooking the ancient city of Damascus, staring through his binoculars at the minarets and cupolas, the palaces and the parks.

  He sensed the diminutive Englishman beside him, smelling of atar of roses, his galabiyah flapping in the late evening breeze which blew in from the distant Mediterranean Sea.

  “This is a bloody disaster, Lawrence. A bloody disaster.” He lowered the binoculars and turned to face the man with whom he’d spent the best part of three months.

  “Disaster? But we’ve taken Damascus. Look.” Lawrence said.

  “We’ve taken Damascus? No, sir, they’ve taken Damascus,” he said pointing to the lines of the Australian Light Horse Division pouring through the gates.

  “You told me you’d be there to greet Allenby. You told me the photograph of you standing on the steps of the palace with Allenby walking up to shake your hand would be worth a fortune. You said it would make history. Well, where’s Allenby and where’s my picture? All I can see is bloody Australians on horseback.”

  The two men looked at the scene in the distance. The Turkish Fourth Army had fled the previous evening in fear of the advance of Allenby and his troops. Lawrence and Faisal had rushed at breakneck speed to overtake them, but nobody counted on the inexhaustible and unrelenting Australians, and their seemingly tireless horses, desert warriors from the other side of the world, as much at home in the Simpson and Nullarbor deserts of their vast and dry continent, as they were in the Nefud and other deserts of the Middle East. Expecting a fight, they had rallied outside the gates for an assault, but when the gates were opened and they were welcomed inside the city, they formed up, and parade-marched as conquerors in Allenby’s name.

  “What if I was to get into a Rolls Royce, and drive in through the gates wearing my Arabic national costume? Surely that’d make a good picture, wouldn’t it?”

  “But the bloody Australians have already liberated the city.”

  “The bloody Australians, as you so ungallantly call them, have done more than liberate Damascus, Mr. Lowell. They’ve also liberated Beersheba, Jerusalem, Megiddo, and just about every other town and city between here and Egypt. Allenby says they’re the greatest cavalry in the history of warfare. So don’t undermine their achievements.”

  “It’s not their achievements my readers back home want to know about, Colonel Lawrence. It’s yours. I’ve made you into Lawrence of Arabia. You carry all the sand of the desert on your back. I cabled my bosses last week to say I’d be sending photographs over to them with you liberating Damascus. That’s what you promised. Now I’m going to be a laughingstock.”

  “Why don’t we say a few men slipped into the city last night, knowing the Turks had evacuated, and it was really me and my army who liberated the citizenry?”

  “A few men? Are you crazy? There’s four thousand horsemen riding through the gates right now.”

  Colonel Lawrence turned around, hearing footsteps approaching them.

  “Highness,” he said, welcoming Faisal.

  Lowell stepped aside to allow the prince to stand between himself and the Englishman. Without acknowledging the two of them, Faisal looked at the city of Damascus with a beaming smile. “This, gentlemen, has been my greatest dream. Ever since we began our journey from Mecca to drive the Turks from our lands, it was always my goal to liberate Damascus. The capture of Deraa and Aqaba were great triumphs, but nothing shall compare to Damascus being in Arabic hands once more. And none of this could have been accomplished without the genius of Mr. Lawrence. You are a true leader of men, Colonel Lawrence. And now that you are our voice, Mr. Thomas, the world knows about the renaissance of the Arabic peoples. Once again, we will be united and a force to be reckoned with.”

  Both men remained respectfully silent.

  “Tomorrow, I shall enter the gates and I shall claim the city for the Arabic peoples.”

  “And what if General Allenby claims it for the British?” asked Lowell Thomas.

  “He will not do that.”

  “The Sykes-Picot agreement?” he said again.

  Faisal shrugged his shoulders. “There are some things, Mr. Thomas, which are a political reality. We Arabs could not have defeated the Turks on our own. We have to reward our friends for their assistance.”

  “Reward, Your Majesty? You call it a reward when you give away your lands?”

  Faisal sighed. “The issue at hand right now, Mr. Thomas, is getting into Damascus and being part of the liberation of the greatest Arab city in all the world.”

  “Greater than Mecca?” he asked.

  Lawrence interrupted. “Mecca is the city of the triumph of the Prophet, Damascus is the history of the Arabic Peoples. It’s their past, their present and their future.”

  Faisal nodded and said softly, “Yes, their present . . . but only the Prophet knows what will be the future.”

  Lawrence shuffled his feet in the sand of the dune overlooking the distant city. “Sir, there’s something I’ve been asked to do by my lords and masters, which I was going to do when as we entered Damascus, but it appears the Australians have pre-empted my little bit of theatricality. I was informed last night by dispatch from Cairo that Allenby is to offer you the crown.”

  The prince and Thomas looked at Lawrence in surprise. The British Colonel pointed to the distant city, and said, “Damascus is to be your seat, Highness. You are shortly to be informed by the King of England that you are to be ennobled as His Majesty, King Faisal the First of Syria. Allenby wrote and asked me to sound you out on the issue. He’s asked me to see whether Your Majesty will accept the throne of the Kingdom of Syria. May I be the very first to congratulate you.”

  Instead of shaking his hand, Lawrence kneeled, and kissed Faisal’s hand, to the astonishment of Thomas, who was too stunned to set up his camera and tripod, and record the scene for posterity.

  As he stood, Lawrence said, “Your Royal Highness, it is my honor to present you with the news that you have been waiting for all these years. You will no longer be a prince, sir, but are to be a king in your own right.”

  Faisal could barely understand the enormity of what had just happened to him. He whispered, “I am overwhelmed, Colonel Lawrence.” The new king looked at the ancient capital city of his new domain, and breathed in the fragrant air of Damascus, his crowning glory.

  “This is . . . it’s . . . I don’t know what to say. I never thought I’d ever become king and ruler of a nation, but Damascus . . . Syria . . . it’s . . .”

  He lapsed into an awkward silence, until Lawrence said, “There’s another bit of good news as well, Your Majesty. “Remember that parcel of letters I received just this morning?”

  The king nodded.

  “Well,” said Lawrence, “it appears you aren’t the only one who has been recognised by King George’s government in Great Britain. Our friend, Miss Gertrude Bell, has been made into a Commander of the British Empire. A CBE. That’s quite something, isn’t it, your Highness?”

  ELEVEN

  Baghdad, 1919

  It was all over. The war to end all wars had finally come to an end, and silence descended on the sinking mud of Europe and the sinking sands of the Middle East. The blood of millions of men drained into the land and was soon washed away by the rain, or bleached by the sun. Gone forever were the voices from the maw of Hell itself, the deafening roar of cannon, the staccato rattle of machine gun, the howling frantic screams of the wounded and the whispered fearful prayers of the dying gasping their last breath.

  Gone too were the frenzied commands of officers trying to cajole already dead men to make one last effort for king and country
by climbing up and over the barbed wire trench to engage the enemy. And gone was the perfume of the battlefield, the languid drifting fog of gun smoke, cordite, and poisonous gasses, of sulfur and chlorine and mustard gas and the stench of rotting flesh.

  From the moment of the declaration of the armistice, families began to breathe free again, knowing their surviving menfolk at home wouldn’t be called upon to don a uniform in order to defend a long-dead cause and be transported to a battlefield whose name they couldn’t pronounce for a reason they didn’t understood. Wives and mothers and sisters who had dreaded every door-knock in case it presaged the arrival of the black-banded telegram began to hold their breath and pray silently that their loved ones would emerge out of the haze of war and return home to the warmth of the hearth and the love of their homes.

  In the center of London, a patriotic crowd accreted to the railings of Buckingham Palace to await the arrival of the king and queen on the balcony overlooking the main quadrangle. Shy and diffident, unlike his portly father Edward who loved to disport himself in the public eye, George and his wife Mary and their many children walked onto the flag-shrouded balcony and waved to the hundreds of thousands who were standing there. It was the ultimate recognition of an end of the past, a semiotic broadcast to the nation of Great Britain that all was normal again.

  But even though there was a mood of euphoria, it was muted by the stark reality which was beginning to dawn on the people of England, that a large part of the generation of young men who should have led Britain into the future, was now dead. There was an implied understanding in the crowd that thanks to the adventurous German Kaiser and the evil Hun and their bed-mates, the Turks, something within England had changed forever.

  Even the king had changed. He had entered the war with the surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but the hatred of everything German had forced him to re-Christen himself as Windsor. And his ties to his German relations, or his Russian cousin the Tsar—to whom he’d refused sanctuary in 1917 after the Bolsheviks took power—were permanently at an end. England, for all its victory, was diminished by the war and isolated from the kings and queens of Europe. As King George sighed and turned to re-enter Buckingham Palace, he wondered whether life for the Royal family of Britain would ever be the same again.

  The war had changed so much of Europe and the Middle East. As England and France struggled to come to terms with their lost generation and began to wonder how they would recover, so too did the Germanic and the Ottoman people, who felt less hope in their futures as pawns to the victorious powers. Their empires had been soundly thrashed and their leaders and populations waited in trepidation for their punishment.

  Everyone, not only those whose menfolk would never return, was yet to fully understand the real cost of the war, for while despair at the loss of humanity was the reaction, hope had yet to become the word of the day. Hope and glory. Today, victorious generals were waxing the tips of their moustaches and preparing to climb over a mountain of corpses in order to receive yet another medal for valour or some honor for service from their monarchs. Diplomats were starting to take out maps with boundaries which no longer had any relevance and initiating the process of drawing red lines through decimated counties, between towns and across neighbourhoods. Bruised, battered, and diseased soldiers were crawling and crowding onto trains and boats and into lorries and buses to be returned home with a few coins in their pockets and the grateful thanks of some famous commander who had been thousands of miles from where the fighting occurred. Mothers and wives and sweethearts were waiting anxiously at docksides to retrieve their loved-ones from hospital ships or transports, praying the next convoy would return to them the whole man, and not a physical and emotional ruin, and neighbours were talking about their need to console neighbours whose empty homes would no longer resonate to the sound of men’s voices.

  While most attention in Europe was centred on victory parades and monarchs taking bows and salutes before their grateful peoples, the remnants of those who once commanded the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East painfully withdrew their disarrayed men and material and contracted to the rump which was left to them, a toehold in Europe and the Turkish remains on the continent of Asia. Today, Turkey was being called the sick man of Europe. It had abandoned its empire and left the Arabs to care for themselves as its government prepared to meet the fury of its own young officer class and the vengeance of its people.

  But in Arabia, the rejoicing at the overthrow of the Ottoman overlords was becoming muted by a reality which was dawning in the minds of peasant and emir alike—what would happen now?

  In early November, 1918, the British and French had published a declaration which every Arabic radio station, every newspaper, and every poster on a village wall detailed prominently. It proclaimed the final liberation of the populations living under the Turkish yoke, and that now the Turkish enemy had been beaten, national governments would be established, chosen by the people themselves. The declaration made promises to the people of Arabia that England and France would assist them in creating new governments and would grant them recognition as soon as they were established. Even President Woodrow Wilson of America promised the right of self-determination. When he had published the fourteen-point plan he proposed to Congress ten months earlier it had hardly made news in Arabia, but now that the war was at an end it was trumpeted as a vision of a future world in which nations could determine their own fates for their own people and would no longer be subject to the dictates of some distant power.

  But now that the armistice had been declared, now that the guns were silent, people began to wonder what their nations would look like in the future. Who would rule them, Arab, English, French, Italian, or Russian? What sort of freedom had they won? What laws would they have to obey? Would they be Syrians or Mesopotamians, would they call themselves Iraqi’s, after the 7th Century settlement in the area, or would they still be members of ancient tribes, free to wander the traditional routes of their lands, or live in peace and security in their age-old capitals?

  These were the questions which were vexing Gertrude Bell’s mind as she read the early Arab responses to the Anglo-French Declaration of self-determination from Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Baghdad.

  “It’s all too sudden, too soon,” she said to her friend, General George MacMunn, over dinner at his Baghdad home. The others around the table listened carefully to what she was saying. Gertrude was the guest of honor and people had gathered to hear her opinion. If anybody could see the way through the diplomatic fog left after the end of the fighting, it was Gertrude.

  “But something has to be delivered to the Arab. After all, he fought with us.”

  “For God’s sake, George, the whole world’s just suffered ten million fighting men killed, about five million civilians dead, and twenty million wounded. Entire empires are no more, kings and queens and emperors and tsars have been blown off the face of the Earth, and the people of whole nations are floundering in uncertainty. We can’t rush into some form of utopian government and have untested administrations which devolve into anarchy in a matter of months. What needs to be done now isn’t self-determination, but the fatherly oversight of a slow transition into joint-rule, and when the instruments of government are firmly established, when women are liberated and a thousand tribes blended into one nation, then, and only then can the locals take over. We can’t rush these people into democracy,” she said firmly. “A government built on the philosophy of democracy can’t exist in a vacuum. It has to have a written constitution delivering a free judiciary administering proscribed laws and regulations, an untrammelled and fiercely independent media which can criticize the government without the editor being beheaded, the Doctrine of the Separation of Powers, and most important of all, a separation between Mosque and State. Just telling these people they can vote for whomsoever they want will lead to all sorts of chaos.

  “Britain and France have the responsibility to ensure this area doesn’t descend into tr
ibal anarchy. We’ve lost so many of our good men in the desert we deserve by right to remain here, to share in the benefits of the oil and food and wealth that this place is capable of producing.”

  She remained quiet for a moment. George MacMunn wondered whether to intervene, but decided not to as it was well known that interrupting Gertrude Bell when she was in reflective or philosophical mode was dangerous.

  As though he were merely a wall and she was using him to draw her ideas upon, she said, “You know, at the beginning of this war, in fact since I was a young girl, I’ve had the idea of melding all the little petty Arab tribes into one great nation, with us as the partner in the region. And I thought this war might provide the catalyst. But I think time and events might have gone beyond me. I was hoping a certain man would rise up and lead the Arabs into nationhood, but it seems fame and fortune has seduced him away from the path I hoped he’d follow.”

  She sipped her glass of malmsey and lit another cigarette. She was now smoking three packets a day, the result of a dreadful wartime diet and the tensions of conflict. The women at the table were used to Gertrude’s idiosyncrasies, and long ago had accepted her habit of smoking, drinking and talking at the same time.

  “Surely these decisions are made at a level far higher than ours,” the general said. “How often have you and I discussed what has to be done in Arabia, only to find that Mr. Balfour or Sir Mark Sykes or that dreadful little Frenchman Picot have failed to take into account any advice we might have given them, and have gone off and done things which are certain to lead to dreadful results?”

  Gertrude snorted. “I’m well aware of the mess politicians are capable of making when they’re only interested in their own ends. But this damnable declaration to create democracy has thrown the whole of Arabia into a tizz. You can’t suddenly tell a people who have been oppressed for the best part of a millennium that their own future as a nation is suddenly in their hands, and then almost casually ask them what they’d like to do with it. It’ll lead to internecine bloodshed. It’s what I predicted decades ago. Leave the Arabs in charge of their own destiny, and all hell is going to break loose. Here in Mesopotamia alone there are at least a dozen contenders who’ll want to lead whatever’s left of the nation, and you know as well as I do, George, how many conflicting undercurrents there are in the rest of Arabic society.