Desert Queen (34 page)

Much of what she recorded she knew from personal experience, and what she did not know she learned by interviewing Arab nationalists who came to the office in search of British backing. “They come up and sit with me by the hour,” she explained in an uncensored letter to Lord Robert Cecil, who was now Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. With their help she corrected the names of places, people and tribes, and in the course of conversation she heard about “remote people and near people who were little but shadows before.” Some of the nationalists were from Arabia and followers of the Sharif Hussein; some, like Aziz al Masri, lived in Egypt and were determinedly anti-Turk; others, such as the wily Sayid Talib of Basrah, the brazen Sharif Muhammad al Faroki, the sophisticated Nuri Said, and the military expert Jafar al Askari were Mesopotamians, officers of the Ottoman army who had created a secret Iraqi society against the Turks. For Gertrude, to talk with them was a taste of earlier travels, and she relished the discussions. “It is great fun,” she wrote.

Her mornings entailed an hour session with an Arabic tutor, “a charming little man,” who sat with her on the balcony as they read and practiced conversation, chatting about people and places they knew. The rest of her day she spent at the office, but only a week after she arrived in Cairo, she wrote disappointedly to Florence, “Mr. Hogarth leaves tomorrow, to my great sorrow. He has been a most friendly support.” She favored quiet meetings with colleagues, and in the evenings, when she returned to her hotel, there were others to sit with at dinner, especially T. E. Lawrence. “Usually I dine here with Col. Wright, Mr. Lawrence and a party of people,” she noted in her first letter home; “we all share the same table.”

Although they came from opposite social strata—she, a scion of one of England’s most prominent families; he, a bastard from the lower middle class—Gertrude and Lawrence were much alike. Oddities, and out of the mainstream, both were loners who felt more at ease in the empty desert than in the crowded drawing room. To them, the Bedouin were more accepting than the British. As Gertrude had written earlier: “You will find in the East … a wider tolerance born of greater diversity … the European may pass up and down the wildest places, encountering little curiosity and of criticism even less. The news he brings will be heard with interest, his opinions will be listened to with attention, but he will not be thought odd or mad, nor even mistaken, because his practices and the ways of his thought are at variance with those of the people among whom he finds himself.” Her words described herself and Lawrence.

As protégés of Hogarth, Gertrude and Lawrence saw eye to eye on the East. Over their evening meal, they conspired about the Sharif Hussein and how to keep him in line; abhorred the French and talked about how to limit their role in Syria; worried about the government in India and how to convince it to support a desert revolt by the Arabs; and concurred over the feuds between the Foreign Office, the War Office, the India Government and their own Cairo bureau. Because of the censors, little of their conversations reached home.

D
espite the disastrous battle at Gallipoli, the war now going on in Mesopotamia and the constant threat of a Turkish attack on the Suez Canal, an eerie air of celebration surrounded Cairo; its inhabitants were like children at play, oblivious of the anxieties of the adult world. Prosperous civilians and smart-looking officers entertained themselves on the tennis courts, the polo grounds or the racetrack of the Sporting Club; Wednesday evenings meant dances at the Majestic Hotel, and every night there were lavish dinners at Shepheards or stylish parties at home. Cairo was exhilarating. Henry McMahon, the British Resident, and his “charming [and] agreeable” wife even extended Gertrude a standing invitation to dine with them whenever she liked.

When she visited and gave Sir Henry her unequivocating advice, they mostly talked about an Arab revolt against the Turks. Since June 1915, six months after he arrived in Cairo to replace Lord Kitchener, Sir Henry McMahon, with the help of the Arab Bureau, had been corresponding with the Sharif Hussein of Mecca. The Sharif was one of the three most powerful men in Arabia—the others being Ibn Rashid and Ibn Saud—his territory of the Hejaz extending across the western region of Arabia and including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as well as the thriving port of Jeddah and the mountain resort of Taif. As a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and guardian of Mecca, the Sharif Hussein was the most important religious figure of the three Arabian chiefs, and thus a welcome ally for the British. Letters and messages had been flying through the desert since Kitchener’s time, and now McMahon was floating bubbles, negotiating the terms of an alliance in which, with the help of British funds and support, the Sharif Hussein planned to strike against the Turks. In return for his help, the British made vague promises of an Arab kingdom after the war. As a show of good intentions, McMahon had already sent the Sharif a down payment of twenty thousand pounds.

“The negotiations with the Sharif have … been very skilfully conducted,” Gertrude wrote knowingly to Lord Robert Cecil. Indeed, so skillful were they that the precise extent of British promises to the Sharif became the subject of bitter controversy for many years between Arab nationalists and British colonialists. But Gertrude was concerned about the Sharif Hussein. “From all the information that comes in he seems to have acquired a very remarkable position in Arabia, but his strength is moral, not military,” she argued, and suggested that Hussein’s rival Ibn Saud should also be drawn to the British side. At her insistence and upon the advice of others, the British put Ibn Saud on the payroll, at almost ten thousand pounds a month. By the end of the war he would defeat Ibn Rashid at Hayil, and by 1925 he would dethrone the Sharif Hussein and rule all of Arabia.

Nurtured by its British nannies in Cairo, an Arab uprising was in the air, coming closer to reality, but “meanwhile,” she noted to Lord Robert, two troublesome factors stood in the way: the French, who controlled much of Syria; and India, whose Viceroy controlled British troops in Mesopotamia and the Gulf and who did not wish to see a war in Arabia.

McMahon’s oblique letters suggested to the Sharif Hussein that he would have a kingdom extending from the parts of Arabia he already controlled to Mesopotamia and most of Greater Syria, including all of TransJordan and some of Palestine. But the British knew they did not have the authority to hand over these areas to the Sharif without the French having a say. Since the days of the Crusades, France had established and maintained strong political and commercial ties in Syria in the
vilayets
of Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut.

While Sir Henry McMahon was drawing a blurry picture of a future Arab kingdom, Mark Sykes was smoothing the way for a future pact between the British and the French. He had been sent by the Foreign Office in the summer of 1915 on a six-month trip to the region to assess the feelings toward a postwar Arab state. Gertrude and Lawrence tried to convince Sykes that the French should be given only a minimum of territory.

Just back from a tour of the Middle East and India, Sykes talked to Gertrude for hours, as they discussed the Arabs and their sentiments toward both the British and the French. Sykes agreed with Gertrude “that the Arabs can’t govern themselves,” she wrote to Lord Robert; “no one is more aware of that than I.” But she believed that the Arabs would be dependent upon the British and would willingly approach them for advice on running their new state after the war. Her major concern was the French. She believed that the French would ignore the Arabs’ needs and thus provoke them, risking the possibility of a future Arab war against the West. She tried hard to convince Sykes that, on the heels of eventual victory, France should be given only a corner of northern Syria, along with the mostly Christian area of Lebanon. In spite of her efforts, however, by the time he returned to England in December 1915, Sykes was prepared to agree with a French official, François-Georges Picot. Picot demanded that Syria, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris, be given to France.

In the area of Mesopotamia—which included Basrah and Baghdad—however, Sykes agreed with Gertrude. There the Arab nationalists could help in defeating the Turks, but it was the British Government in India, not the administration in Egypt, that had political and military authority over Mesopotamia and Arabia.

I
n November 1914, the India Expeditionary Force D had been sent to seize Basrah from Turkish troops, and, having succeeded, was now under the command of General Townshend, battling its way to Baghdad. Sykes’s mission in Delhi had been to try to convince the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, to support and finance an Arab revolt, which would lead to a future Arab kingdom, including Mesopotamia. But Hardinge considered the revolt a dangerous idea. Great Britain was the largest Muslim empire in the world. Its tens of millions of Indian Muslims were members of the Sunni sect; their holy leader, the Caliph, was the Sultan of Turkey. Hardinge worried that the Indian Muslims under his domain, who were not Arabs, would be unsympathetic to an Arab rebellion against the Sunni Muslim Turks, and that they would be angered by any turmoil near the Muslim holy sites. He refused to support an Arab movement.

But what upset him even more was that McMahon promised to give Mesopotamia to the Sharif Hussein. The port of Basrah was of vital interest to the British. It was a strategic point from which the British guarded the Persian oil fields and the installations at Abadan, the largest oil refineries in the world; in addition, Basrah served as a strategic link on the route to India. Furthermore, the city of Baghdad, where the British had been established since the 1600s, was an important commercial center and involved all of their trade in the Gulf. To the British officials in the service of the India Government, the Arabists in Cairo were creating a “Frankenstein Monster.”

The British Government of India wanted to annex Mesopotamia. Furious with his Cairo colleagues, Viceroy Hardinge lashed out in a letter to the Foreign Office: “I devoutly hope that this proposed Arab State will fall to pieces, if it is ever created. Nobody could possibly have devised a scheme more detrimental to British interests in the Middle East than this. It simply means misgovernment, chaos and corruption, since there never can be and never has been any consistency or cohesion among the Arab tribes.… I cannot tell you how detrimental I think this interference and influence from Cairo have been.”

By the end of 1915 the Arab Bureau was desperate. The British administration in Egypt and the British Government in India eyed each other as rivals: Cairo was in charge of Egypt and the Sudan; India was in charge of overseeing the sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf. Both governments toyed with the question of who would control the future Middle East. The India Government wanted to maintain its authority in Arabia and to annex Iraq; the Egypt administration wanted to create an Arab kingdom extending from Arabia to Iraq, over which the British would have influence but far less control and, presumably, at far less cost.

There was little communication between Cairo and Delhi, and the telegrams that were sent were not much more than brusque formalities. In a letter to her father, sent by diplomatic pouch, Gertrude wrote: “There is a great deal of friction between India and Egypt over the Arab question which entails a serious want of co-operation between the Intelligence Departments of the two countries and the longer it goes on the worse it gets.”

In order to move ahead with their plans for an Arab uprising, Cairo needed Hardinge’s support. The Viceroy alone could provide the men, the money and the arms. There was only one person who could possibly persuade Hardinge to change his mind. Gertrude had known Hardinge since her youthful trip to Bucharest when both he and Domnul came to visit her uncle, Ambassador Frank Lascelles. Now, with Domnul, a close friend of Hardinge’s, in India working on a special project for the government, she was encouraged by her chief, General Clayton, to pay him a call.

“So I’m going,” she wrote to her father. “I feel a little nervous about being the person to carry it out … but the pull one has in being so unofficial is that if one doesn’t succeed no one is any the worse.”