Desert Queen (35 page)

“I
’m off finally at a moment’s notice to catch a troop ship at Suez,” she wrote on January 24, 1916, hardly betraying her anxiety; “I really do the oddest things.” The
SS Euripides
was crowded with military men, two battalions of soldiers on their way to India. “The cat and I are the only two people not in uniform,” she scrawled to Florence. The five-day cruise ended in Karachi; from there, she took the railway line to Delhi. She arrived, coated in dust on an icy cold morning; Domnul, still red-haired but plumper, was waiting on the platform.

Taking her in an official car, Domnul motored with her to her quarters, a luxurious tent with a sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, and stayed to talk while she breakfasted. A short while later the Viceroy appeared. Gertrude curtsied and launched her case. “He is very anxious that I should return to somewhere in the neighbourhood of my old hunting grounds,” she wrote home excitedly, referring to Iraq.

After lunch at the Viceroy’s residence, she presented him with a memorandum on what she felt she could do to improve relations between India and Egypt. For all his power as head of India, Hardinge was out of the loop. Actions were being taken and policies set in Cairo without his consultation. He was eager for better communications, and with his help she set to work, meeting with officials from India Intelligence headquartered in Simla, digging through Intelligence dossiers to add information to her tribal report, working with officials in India Foreign Affairs, using every opportunity to argue for support of an Arab revolt. She found them “curiously eager to talk—much more than I expected,” and was asked by India Intelligence to serve as an editor for a publication they were compiling, a Gazetteer of Arabia. After three weeks she deemed her visit a success, writing proudly to her father: “I think I have pulled things straight a little as between Delhi and Cairo.” In another note she added, “It is essential India and Egypt should keep in the closest touch since they are dealing with two sides of the same problem.”

But her greatest interest was in Mesopotamia. In a note to Captain Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, she wrote: “I remember your putting your finger on the Bagdad corner of the map and saying that the ultimate success of the war depended on what we did there. You are one of the people who realised how serious are the questions we have to face.”

Whatever happened, the British needed Iraq. Its huge grain supplies could feed the army, its proximity to oil could fuel the navy, and its location put it at the center of the land route to India. Mesopotamia, it was hoped, would be the place where the British could stave off the Turks by setting the Arabs against the Ottoman army. At the end of February 1916, Gertrude bade farewell to Domnul and Hardinge, and, having established a new line of communication between India and Egypt, with the Viceroy’s blessing she set sail for Basrah.

From its position at the head of the Gulf, near the convergence of Iraq, Kuwait, Arabia and Persia, few places served as better listening posts, and few people were better equipped to listen than Gertrude. For the next few weeks, she was told by Hardinge, her mission was to gather information from the Arabs and to act as a liaison between British Intelligence in Cairo and India Intelligence in Delhi.

She would be the eyes, the ears, the lips and the hands of Great Britain, watching, listening, talking to and stroking the Arabs of Iraq. It would be her job to convince the Arab tribes to cooperate with the British. But she would be working without an official position.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

A Remarkably Clever Woman

T
he British troop transport steamed across the Indian Ocean, leaving behind the warm, muggy weather of Karachi, sailing north into the milder temperatures of the Persian Gulf. Past its ally of Kuwait it went, past the freshwater port where in 1899 the Sheikh had signed a protective treaty with the British; past Abadan, bowing to the refinery of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, whose oil was used mostly for British warships; past Muhammerah, salaaming the friendly sheikhdom to the east. The steamer had entered the yellow waters of the Shatt al Arab, the narrow river uniting the Tigris and the Euphrates and linking the Gulf to Basrah, the vital Mesopotamian port.

From the rail of the ship Gertrude watched the shoreline as familiar groves of date-filled palm trees floated by, followed by Arab huts and mud-walled gardens graced with apricot trees. For thousands of years the river banks were home to people who had learned to harness the floods and enjoy the rice, barley, wheat, corn, dates and cotton yielded by the fruitful soil. “No doubt it was to the fertility of the country that earliest civilisation owed its existence,” Gertrude wrote when she first explored these shores. Close to here Adam and Eve had dwelled in the Garden of Eden, the Ark of Noah had been constructed, the Tower of Babel built, Babylonia had thrived and the Sumerians had invented the written form of language. By the medieval era, a string of conquerors had dispatched their soldiers to this land of
The Thousand and One Arabian Nights
: first the early Muslims, then Abbasids, then Seljuks ruled, only to be quashed in 1258 by the maniacal Mongol Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, who not only demolished Baghdad, murdered the intellectuals and destroyed the Islamic Caliph, but laid waste to the lands and ravaged the ancient system of irrigation. It was nearly three hundred years later, in 1534, that Suleiman the Magnificent brought Iraq into the Ottoman sphere.

For Gertrude the key word of Iraq was “romance. Wherever you look for it you will find it. The great twin rivers, gloriously named, the huge Babylonian plains, now desert which were once a garden of the world; the story stretching back into the dark recesses of time—they shout romance.”

O
n the morning of March 3, 1916, Gertrude stepped carefully onto the slip at Basrah, holding her long skirts with one hand, her hat with the other, dodging the black flies and the swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed around. Along the waterfront she caught sight of the odd Basrah houses made of yellow baked bricks, their latticed wooden balconies leaning out like busybodies over the mud streets mobbed with Arabs. She was glad to see it again, she scrawled in a note to her father soon after she arrived: “I feel as if I were in my own country once more, and welcome it, ugly though it is.” Still, she was concerned, unsure about her assignment and uneasy about what kind of welcome she would receive. Would they find a job for her or would they send her away at once? “Now it remains to be seen,” she wrote apprehensively.

In Delhi and Cairo, the Great War had seemed far removed, but in Basrah the reverberations of battle still shook the city. Seized from the enemy in November 1914, the Turkish
vilayet
, the governmental province of thirty-three thousand local Arabs, was now a British Occupied Territory, thick with thousands of British soldiers and ruled by military decree. Sir Percy Cox, the Chief Political Officer—“a very big person,” Gertrude noted to her father—was on a visit to India Government headquarters in Bushire, but a warm greeting awaited her nonetheless. With few British wives in Basrah and almost no one to talk to, Lady Cox, whom Gertrude had met before, giddily showed her around their old Arab house and invited her to stay.

When morning came, Gertrude set off, decked out in her petticoats, stockings, dress and hat, through the palm gardens and across the irrigation canals, to present herself at General Headquarters. There, in the large brick building set along a canal, she introduced herself to Colonel Beach, in charge of Military Intelligence, and renewed her friendship with Campbell Thompson, last seen in Carchemish and now Beach’s assistant in charge of decoding Turkish telegrams. They both were very welcoming, Gertrude reported to Florence, but the rest of the staff could hardly bother to hide their disgust.

Hardinge had sent her to Basrah with a fuzzy task. She had no specific job or title, nor was she even on the military payroll. To the rigid male world of India Expeditionary Force D, Miss Bell, as she would be known, was a flighty meddler, not to be allowed to interfere. She was lectured on military rules, told that her mail would be strictly censored and was limited on where she could go and what she could do; the woman who had entered the tents of scores of desert sheikhs was ordered not to visit any native homes without a chaperone. Gertrude stamped out her cigarette and listened impatiently.

She was to act as the informational link between Delhi and Cairo, contributing what she could on the Indian side for the Arab gazetteer, rousing support on the Egyptian side for an Arab revolt. But the Basrah military (attached to the Indian forces) had already shown their contempt for Cairo’s ideas. “I should like to see it announced that Mesopotamia was to be annexed to India as a colony for India and Indians,” Captain Arnold T. Wilson had written more than a year earlier, in November 1914, “that the Government of India would administer it, and gradually bring under cultivation its vast unpopulated desert plains, peopling them with martial races from the Punjab.” The headstrong Wilson, Sir Percy Cox’s second-in-command, was hardly ready to accept Miss Bell or any notions she carried with her from Cairo.

At least Colonel Beach cooperated. With his help Gertrude was given access to the Intelligence files for her research on the gazetteer. But with so many military personnel in Basrah, there was hardly space to set up a desk. Instead, for the first few days she was handed the tribal material, names and places that had become so much a part of her life, and was shoehorned alongside Mr. Thompson in Colonel Beach’s bedroom—“a plan,” she noted dryly, “which is not very convenient either for us or for him.”

At teatime she joined the Political Officers—among them the handsome H. St. John Philby and the tall, dark-eyed A. T. Wilson—immersing them at once in a pool of gossip. She filled them with fresh news from Cairo, and dished up tidbits of the negotiations between Sir Henry McMahon and the Sharif Hussein. “She had plenty to say for herself,” St. John Philby remarked in his memoirs.

Later in the evening in her room at the Coxes’, Gertrude sent off a reassuring note. “I think it’s going to be exceedingly interesting,” she wrote cheerfully to her father. “I’m now looking for a servant—oh, for Fattuh!” she moaned. “It’s delicious weather but what Basrah is like! Frogs and mud are the sum of my general impressions; muddy stagnant creeks and crowds of Arabs—but I like it!”

For several days her routine remained the same, and then on March 8, Sir Percy Cox returned. She had met him before, in 1902 in India, and in 1909 at the home of their mutual friends the Ritchies, when Sir Percy had cautioned her strongly not to go to Arabia, not to attempt a visit to Ibn Rashid or Ibn Saud. Taking his advice, she had, instead, made the trip across the Syrian desert that led her to Ukhaidir. As disheartening as it had been to hear Cox then, it was only slightly more reassuring to see him now.

Dressed in army officer’s uniform, but with the white tabs on his collar to mark him Political, Cox was fifty-one, four years older than Gertrude, tall, thin and distinguished-looking, with wavy silver hair, a firm jaw, large crooked nose and blue eyes that met hers directly. Known to be a cool, dispassionate soldier-statesman, he had been educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, had served in the region for nearly a decade as Agent for the Government of India and had won the respect of Arabs and British alike. He knew, of course, of Gertrude’s reputation, but the reticent Cox showed her none of the fatherly encouragement she had received from Chirol, Hogarth or even Hardinge. He could barely hide his suspicions of her Cairo colleagues, and McMahon’s promises to the Sharif Hussein seemed to him unwise, if not outrageous. Sending a woman to Basrah did little more to assure him. Yet a letter from the Viceroy Hardinge had advised him to take her seriously: “She is a remarkably clever woman with the brains of a man.”