Desert Queen (37 page)

I
n spite of her fascination with the Arabs, however, Gertrude was less than keen about their women. She rarely entered the harems in the tents and spent almost no time with the wives in town. Nor did she care about Islam, any more than she cared about Christianity. Her lack of understanding irritated Dorothy Van Ess, who insisted that knowledge about harem life was essential to understanding the character and psychology of Arab men. Nor, she added, could one possibly ignore the profound influence of Islam on social and political conditions. Gertrude disagreed. Dorothy became exasperated. “I have sufficient regard for your intelligence,” she chided, “to think that if you knew anything about either of these subjects, you would hold different opinions.” Gertrude laughed. “Touché!” she replied.

The two women had actually become good friends. “I get rather tired of seeing nothing but men,” Gertrude complained to her mother; “Lady Cox is absolutely no good to any mortal soul—she is so damned stupid.… She is as kind as ever she can be, but there’s no possible subject on which you can converse with her. My great standby is Mrs. Van Ess.” As for the Arab wives, they would remain only a mild curiosity. She might accept the fact that they wielded influence behind the scenes, but it was male political power, raw, intense, and directly affecting society, that she found so intriguing.

“L
etters are a great joy,” Gertrude wrote wistfully to Hugh. Alone in her room in Basrah, she had little else to look forward to, and as quickly as the mail arrived, she composed her responses, maintaining a lifeline between herself and high-powered friends. Lord Cromer; Mr. Montagu, the Secretary of State for India; Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister; all were recipients of her notes, in which she apprised them of activities in Mesopotamia. As for Captain Hall, the Director of Intelligence, she had sent him a long letter sketching out what people in Delhi and Basrah were thinking about the future of Iraq—mainly that it should be run in some way in conjunction with Egypt, rather than by India. Afterward she wrote to her father: “You might find out some time, discreetly, whether he likes having letters from me. I write only when there are things I think it might be useful for him to know.”

She was also corresponding with T. E. Lawrence in Cairo, where her colleagues were now celebrating some success. On March 9, 1916, the British Cabinet had voted to pay the Sharif Hussein a subsidy of one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds per month in gold sovereigns, which they would continue for more than a year; in addition, plans were being made to send him five thousand rifles and a quarter of a million rounds of amunition in order to ensure his success against the Turks.

In Mesopotamia, too, activities were heating up; as Colonel Beach had mentioned, it looked as if the troops would soon be heading toward Baghdad. “There might be a good many things to be done, and it could be exceedingly interesting to see how the thing works out,” Gertrude wrote to T. E. Lawrence. “My only regret is that you aren’t here, but failing that please cable any advice or suggestions.… Do seize a moment of the night and send me a word of your news.”

Still concerned about the lack of communication between India and Egypt, she continued: “I have always thought an exchange of people in the various Inter-Depts. would be an immense advantage … and I should think yet more favourably of the scheme if it included your coming out here.

“I’ve written enough,” she scrawled. Then, ending her letter to Lawrence, she confided dejectedly: “To read it you might think I was a real person seriously considering affairs of the moment, but I don’t feel like a real person at all—much more like some irresponsible flotsam carried here and there on the flood and floating aimlessly first round one eddy and then round another, until in the end I suppose I shall float back somewhere, and remembering all these months wonder what I was doing in them. And find no answer. I hate war; oh, and I’m so weary of it—of war, of life. Not of Basrah, especially; I would just as soon be here as anywhere—and as soon be anywhere as here, except as yet in England. Not there.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

A Messy Situation

B
ritish officials in London had been reorganizing the office of Military Intelligence in Cairo, officially renaming it the Arab Bureau and assigning as its head David Hogarth. With the bureau’s work clearly focused on the coming Arab Revolt, Hogarth wanted Gertrude to leave Basrah and return to Cairo. To her superiors in Egypt she was a wellspring of information, and the following week Lawrence was dispatched to Iraq, hoping to find a replacement for Gertrude so that she could come back with him to Cairo.

Along with this overt task, Lawrence’s mission was partly covert. Only a short while before, General Clayton had tried to help save the British force at Kut by offering to send Aziz al Masri, a former officer in the Ottoman army, to tempt away disgruntled Arabs from their Turkish troops. The scheme had been shrugged off by the generals in Basrah, who found it less than realistic. But now the situation was growing more desperate. Unbeknownst to Gertrude, a far more distasteful secret plan had been devised by General Townshend. The British commander, fighting an overwhelming Turkish force at Kut, had proposed to London that he offer a bribe to the Turkish army commander; with Whitehall’s approval as much as one million pounds would be paid to free the British soldiers. The man who would carry the money was T. E. Lawrence.

At the beginning of March 1916 Lawrence had dashed off a note to his mother, aware, of course, that it would be read by the censor: “I am going away, for a month or 6 weeks, to consult with some people, and suggest certain things. Is this vague enough? I hope to meet Miss Bell shortly, since we are much on the same tack.”

By the end of the month he was on a ship to Iraq and informed his mother that he could not write to her from Basrah. He would be “very busy ashore,” he said, with things which he could not discuss. But, he added, “I want to bring Gertrude back with me, and our Arabian office will be complete.” The rare use by him of a woman’s first name was an indication of their unusual relationship.

It was late and raining heavily the night of April 5, 1916, when Lawrence walked into the office of Gertrude Bell and Campbell Thompson at Military Intelligence at Basrah. He had just maneuvered himself the three hundred yards from the boat dock, sliding “over the top of what seemed to be a bank of soft soap and toffee.” Delighted to see their old chum, Gertrude and Thompson brought him directly to Headquarters to meet Sir Percy Cox. Lawrence handed the Chief Political Officer a letter from Sir Henry McMahon, explaining that he was “under orders from the War Office to give his services in regard to Arab matters.”

Percy Cox had learned earlier of the scheme to bribe the Turks and had found the proposal appalling. He had no instructions for Lawrence, the dignified Cox declared. Furthermore, he wrote tartly in a memo to Colonel Beach, in no way did he want his name connected with such business: “You see, I am not a migrant—I am a permanent official in the Gulf and I may conceivably have to remain here for a time after hostilities are concluded. The project in view is pretty sure to become known sooner or later especially if it proves unsuccessful and I cannot afford as Political Officer of the Government of India to be identified with it.”

Before Lawrence set off on the two-hundred-mile journey for Kut—fortified by tins of biscuits, beef, and jams and loaves of bread—he spent time with Gertrude, meeting people she admired, such as Reader Bullard; discussing at length the Arab Bureau and the future of the Middle East; and interviewing local Arabs he hoped would be interested in instigating a revolt. A Pan-Arab party had been formed in Basrah, but its leading member, Sayid Talib, an influential but ruthless Basrah nationalist, had been deported by Cox as a “state guest” to India; the others Lawrence met with showed no interest in the project and he referred to them as “jackals.”

The week had been “greatly enlivened by the appearance of Mr. Lawrence,” Gertrude wrote just before Lawrence left Basrah on April 10. “We have had great talks and made vast schemes for the government of the universe. He goes up river tomorrow, where the battle is raging these days. With what anxiety we watch for news it would be difficult to tell you.”

His departure left her again without many allies. Her family friend, the linguist Aubrey Herbert, was coming to Basrah, but only for a day, heading north to join Lawrence in the bribery negotiations with the Turks. A year earlier, shortly before Doughty-Wylie had gone off to Gallipoli, Herbert, an Intelligence officer in Egypt, and Dick had dined together. Now, over dinner with Herbert in Basrah, she would have a chance to talk to him about Dick. “Oh how glad I shall be to see him!” she wrote. “One’s extraordinarily lonely with no one of one’s own. That’s why even Mr. Lawrence was such a godsend. He speaks the same language at any rate.” Lawrence may not have been of her class, but at least they saw eye to eye.

Looking out over the river from her new apartment, Gertrude felt cheered. The spring rains had subsided, the city was no longer coated with mud, and the flowers, which she missed, were now making their appearance. “Even Basrah has a burst of glory in April,” she wrote enthusiastically to her father. “The palm gardens are deep in luxuriant grass and corn, the pomegranates are flowering, the mulberries almost ripe and in the garden of the house where I am staying the roses are more wonderful than I can describe. It’s the only garden in Basrah, so I’m lucky.”

She now wakened at five-thirty each morning, eager to exercise her favorite way, on horseback. Riding through the palm groves, then out to the edges of the desert, she passed “British troops, Indian troops of every kind, buffalo carts, mules, tongas, motors and motor lorries of the latest pattern, camels—reed huts and telephone wires.” By eight-thirty, she had bathed and breakfasted and was in her office, and, except for the hot sun, she had no complaints. Her work on the gazetteer was almost complete, but in other areas there was much to be done; her days were spent debriefing Arabs coming into Headquarters, correcting maps, and circulating information between Cairo and Delhi, tasks that Hogarth had hoped someone else could do when Gertrude returned to Egypt.

In truth, she enjoyed the work in Basrah more than the work in Cairo. In Egypt she would be kept behind a desk and flooded with paper work. Here the material was all raw, fresh and firsthand. She was uniquely qualified for the job, able to read and speak fluent Arabic and alert to the politics of the place. No one else in the Intelligence Department could be relied on to do it satisfactorily, she informed Hogarth. She had already recommended Mr. Bullard for the job and had introduced him to Lawrence, who approved; but reluctant to give up the post, she shared her doubts with Hogarth: “As long as I am here I can get all the new stuff, but much of it walks in on two feet, in the shape of a sheikh down from Nasariyah or elsewhere, and when I am gone there will be no one to collect it.”

The other likely choice to replace her was Campbell Thompson, but Gertrude found him inept. Bluntly, she reported to her chief, “If you will let me say so, he isn’t any damned use—I think I have never come across anyone quite like this before, so amiable and so … futile.” She was doing a great deal of work on new maps, work that Campbell Thompson might have done. However, she wrote, “he hates maps and can’t look at them!”