Desert Queen (36 page)

As Chief Political Officer, Sir Percy was to oversee the new administration in Mesopotamia. Good relations with the local tribes were of primary concern: the Arabs could not only ensure food and housing provisions for the British; they could help the army defeat the Turks. But the tribal sheikhs, many of whom owed their wealth to the Ottomans, were as likely to side with the Turks as with the Entente; if they did, the British could face disaster. Local tribes could block the British lines of communication, choke the oil pipelines, cut off food and water supplies and provide significant strength—tens of thousands of men and rifles—to the Ottoman army.

There had already been a series of frustrating rejections. When one important sheikh was approached by an American intermediary for the British, he told the man, “The Turks have offered me one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars if we will join them.” But, he went on, “if the British give me two hundred thousand dollars we will go with them and refuse the Turks.” When the British officials heard his request, they turned it down, resenting the ransom. Shaking his head in disappointment, the Arab chief replied sadly, “I am sorry. I think the British are going to win, and I would like to be on the winning side.”

When a meeting was requested with another chief, Ajaimi Sadun, who controlled four thousand Turkish rifles, the powerful Arab hemmed and hawed, fearing that his reputation would suffer if he abandoned the Turks for no cause; nevertheless, he allowed, it might be possible to find an excuse. He admitted he distrusted the Turks, but they had promised him all the Ottoman Crown lands in the Basrah
vilayet
. On the other hand, he said, if the British could assure him they would win, he would switch sides. But, then again, he added, the British Government was an unknown quantity of very uncertain stability. He was hesitant to decide. At last, he declared, he had made his decision: he would go with the Turks.

Such discord only added to the British generals’ contempt for the local Arabs, many of whom raided army storehouses in Basrah, and did little to help the disdainful army win the tribes to their side. Cox believed the General Command was inept. For the past three months, IEF D had been struggling north toward Baghdad—without enough river transport, airplanes, doctors, medicine or food—into a quagmire of Ottoman territory, where, to make matters worse, as Gertrude noted later, the Arabs “backed the winner,” thinking it would be the Turks, “and hung like jackals round our troops, looted our camps, murdered our wounded, stripped our dead.” Cox had lost patience with the military leadership, particularly with the man in charge, General Lake. Thinking Gertrude might be a useful ally, Sir Percy was polite, promising to send on to her any Arabs he thought would be of interest.

T
he day following her meeting with Cox, Gertrude lunched with the local command. General Lake, General Cowper, General Money and General Offley Shaw of the India Expeditionary Force stood stiffly, their khakis starched, their mustaches waxed to a point, as Gertrude entered the Officers’ Mess, and, keeping her head high and her back straight, lifting her skirts ever so slightly off the floor, took her place at the table. As she had done at the time of her Oxford exams, she sat tall and prickly as a long-stemmed rose and faced the four iron men.

Across a sea of damask they raised their glasses, sipping the Rhine wine they had captured from local German cellars. From under his bushy brows, the gaunt-faced General Lake eyed her unruffled expression, and with exceeding politeness the officers fired away, asking her questions about the Arab Bureau. Like their colleagues in Delhi, they were opposed to a movement of Arab nationalism, opposed to an Arab revolt against the Turks, opposed to the Sharif of Mecca and opposed to giving up control of Mesopotamia. Most of all, they graciously omitted from their account, they were opposed to a woman messing in their business.

Nevertheless, they needed her help. Facing a Turkish force of equal size, the British troops had to march through unmapped territory—desert, swamps and palm groves—as they progressed toward Baghdad. They had to be sure the Arabs would not ambush them, and for that they required local guides, men who could be trusted so that the natives would not attack. And they needed maps to know where they were going.

Gertrude’s green eyes pierced the room, and she began to speak in a deep and knowledgeable tone that shattered their words into splints. There was much she could do to help the generals, she assured them: she knew how important it was to establish ties with the Arabs; she had heard how frustrating it had been. No one was on a friendlier basis with the sheikhs and notables than Gertrude: not only did she know many of them by name; she knew their sons and their brothers, had sat in their tents and their salons, had drunk their coffee and shared their bread. With her help, the Arab chiefs might be persuaded to lend their support; with her help, the troops might have enough supplies for housing and food; and with her help, the maps could be drawn so that the army could find its way to Baghdad.

Their response arrived with the pudding. Later that afternoon, Gertrude wrote to her mother, “They moved me and my maps and books on to a splendid great verandah with a cool room behind it where I sit and work all day long.” With great enthusiasm and a dash of naïveté she noted, “Everyone is being amazingly kind.”

The war had put great distance between Gertrude and home. She longed to know how her brother Maurice, on sick leave from the European front, was faring, but mail from England took more than a month to reach Basrah, and with so many ships sunk by the enemy, letters often went down at sea. “One feels—and indeed is—awfully far away, and the echoes of war in France which must to you sound so deafening are nearly lost here under those of Mesopotamia,” she wrote to her father.

There was little local news she could discuss in her letters because of the censors. She made small references to Kut al Amara, the peninsula town where, as a result of numerous command mistakes, several thousand British forces, struggling through swamps and muck as they inched their way from Basrah toward Baghdad, had been caught under siege. Forced to flee from a battle at Ctesiphon, only forty miles from their goal, they had retreated to Kut. There, in the muddy town on the Tigris, they were besieged, trapped without enough food, medicine or ammunition to fight their way out. For three months the soldiers—many wounded, others suffering from dysentery and malaria—had waited desperately for reinforcements. But British troops on their way to help were blockaded by a Turkish army composed of Arabs ten times their number. Again and again, boatloads of British soldiers were sent up the river to relieve the force; again and again, their bodies were paddled back by wooden barge. Still, the air was electric with suggestions that the Turks might be giving in.

In reply to questions from her mother, she said she had no idea how long she was going to stay or where she would go next or what she would be doing. It seemed, though, that she might be in Mesopotamia much longer than she had planned. The thought of the steamy summer two months ahead prompted a flood of requests: she needed hot weather clothes that would be easy to wash; petticoats, crêpe de Chine shirts and stockings; an evening gown in cream lace that touched the floor, narrow black velvet ribbon to wear around her neck, a pair of tussore knickerbockers and two pairs of thin stays. Finally, a pair of eyeglasses and a pair of spectacles, stronger than the ones she had now, since all the mapmaking was straining her eyes.

P
redictably, the spring rains came, flooding the city, causing the roads to excrete slime. On a morning drenched from cloud bursts, Gertrude walked from the Coxes’ house to Headquarters, hurdling like an athlete over gulfs of mud, “tight rope dancing” on fallen palm trees, certain at any moment she might slip and sink into a pool of muck.

Word arrived that Colonel Beach wished to see her. He had some information, he said; it looked as if the British forces up north would soon be moving forward toward Baghdad, and if so, they would immediately encounter the local tribes. The colonel often called on Gertrude to meet with local Arabs and to help with the mapping and charting the tribes. More than fifty groups inhabited the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, including the rice-growing Abu Muhammad; the nomadic Bani Lam, with their fine-bred herds of horses and camels; the troublesome Bani Rabiah of Kut; the two hundred thousand people, including the Sadun, who made up the loose confederation of the Muntafik; the two hundred and fifty thousand Anazeh, Bedouin who roamed the Syrian desert from Aleppo all the way to Central Arabia; and on the Euphrates, above Ramadi, the great shepherd tribe of the Dulaim. Tribal organization remained as it had been for a dozen generations, since nomad tribes had wandered north from Arabia; the power of the sheikhs was deeply rooted, tribal laws and customs held sway and tribal blood feuds provided the excuse for constant and bitter revenge.

This time Beach wanted Gertrude to send secret messages behind enemy lines: offer “a word of friendship” to Nuri Said, the Mesopotamian officer in the Ottoman army who had started a secret society against the Turks, he suggested, and to Fahad Bey, the Paramount Chief of the Anazeh, to encourage them to break free of the Turks. He was “eager to try the experiment.” By the way, the colonel mentioned, he was having trouble getting through to a sheikh of the Dulaim tribe. “Why not send him a message through Fahad Bey?” Gertrude advised. “They will all be camping together at this time of year.” Only two years earlier, on her way back from Hayil, she herself had stayed at Fahad Bey’s camp near Karbala, and years before that she had sipped coffee in the tents of the Dulaim.

In the evenings she waded back through the mud to the Coxes’, but aside from Sir Percy and his wife, there were few others who invited her to dine. Even at lunch in the mess she was shunned or scoffed and sneered at by the staff, most of whom still regarded her with suspicion. Only Henry Dobbs, a family acquaintance who had been made Political Officer, and his second-in-command, Reader Bullard, offered to take walks with her through the palm gardens. Thanks to them, as well, she met Dorothy and John Van Ess, an American missionary couple who would become two of her closest friends.

John Van Ess had traveled extensively into the marshlands, developing an expertise on the local villages and tribes. Almost from the moment the British conquered Basrah, he had been providing them with information and supplying them with Arab agents behind the Turkish lines. Despite his proselytizing profession and Gertrude’s religious disbelief, the two had much in common, and it was not long before she started calling on him, seeking his help on the tribes. Later he composed a limerick about her:

G is for Gertrude, of the Arabs she’s Queen
,
And that’s why they call her
Um el Mumineen,
If she gets to Heaven (I’m sure
I’ll
be there)
She’ll even ask Allah, “What’s your tribe, and where?
”