Desert Queen (40 page)

As interesting as she found the work, the lack of friends left her lonely. “I feel rather detached from you,” she lamented in a letter to her father. “I wish I could sit somewhere midway and have a talk with you once or twice a week.” The “kind” and “generous” Sir Percy Cox, the Chief Political Officer, was still somewhat aloof, shy and reserved, and although she met with him several times a week, he was not the type whose advice she could seek or with whom she could ever gossip.

Daily events, large and small, sent her emotions reeling, roller-coasting from happiness to disappointment and back again. On Monday, June 5, 1916, the Sharif Hussein raised his standard and led his men in the Hejaz against Turkish forces. If the actual fighting at Mecca was only a prelude, Gertrude noted victoriously a few weeks later, it was still “one up to Egypt and my beloved chiefs there … the revolt of the Holy Places is an immense moral and political asset.” When Hugh wrote to ask his daughter if she had been responsible for instigating the revolt, she confided, “No, I didn’t stir up the Sharif! he stirred himself up. But, it was partly about all that business that I went to India.”

The excitement she had felt in June was soon tempered by the open opposition to the Arab Revolt by the Viceroy of India, who called it a “displeasing surprise,” and feared that the Muhammadans in India would see it as “Christian interference” with the Islamic religion.

More frustration came in July. After George Lloyd paid a visit to the front at Amara, where the British army was still fighting the Turks on the way to Baghdad, he returned from the scorching heat with harrowing accounts of confusion and incompetence, of soldiers suffering from a drastic lack of ice and a paucity of food. “Human skill in organization and human foresight have seldom had a less satisfactory advertisement than in this campaign,” Gertrude charged in a letter to her parents. “Someday I’ll tell you tales about it all—and you won’t believe me. No one could who hasn’t seen the things going on. I do not think the Indian Government can escape blame—I don’t think it should.” But she blamed the government in London for not carefully thinking out a policy: “We’ve paid for this negligence and want of forethought in blood and misery, in lives that can’t be brought back.”

Relieved to know that her own brother was safely in England and thankful he was not fighting in Mesopotamia, she acknowledged: “The real difficulty here is that we don’t know exactly what we intend to do in this country. Can you persuade people to take your side when you are not sure in the end whether you’ll be there to take theirs? No wonder they hesitate; and it would take a good deal of potent persuasion to make them think that your side and theirs are compatible.” Neither the government in London nor the government in India had made firm plans for the future. Furthermore, to the dismay of many Arabs, the Sharif Hussein, who was counting on help from an uprising in Syria, had now drawn up a statement proclaiming himself King of all the Arabs.

To make matters worse, whatever persuasive powers she and Sir Percy had used to try to neutralize Ibn Rashid had been unsuccessful. “We didn’t succeed in roping in Ibn Rashid,” she reported unhappily. But, she continued, “it’s not the immediate war problems here I think of most; it’s the problems after the war, and I don’t know what sort of hand we shall be able to take in solving them. However there’s no harm in thinking about them and that’s what I do. Write, too,” she pleaded. “I’ve plenty of official openings for that.”

Soon after, Percy Cox left once again for upriver, leaving her to his contrary deputy, A. T. Wilson. As the summer progressed, those who could, escaped Basrah’s oppressive heat: by August, Mr. Dobbs, suffering from exhaustion, had gone to India, and George Lloyd had left for Cairo. “I have a good many acquaintances but no friends, except for Mr. Dobbs and Gen. MacMunn,” Gertrude wrote home. She had found an ally in MacMunn, the Inspector General of Communications, “a nice creature, full of vitality and energy.” They often went out on the river together in his launch. But, she added achingly, “I can’t tell you what it’s like to have nobody, nobody whom I have ever known before or who has ever known me before.” Her only woman friend, Dorothy Van Ess, had also gone on holiday to India. Before she left, Gertrude asked her to bring back a few thin dresses. Mrs. Van Ess recalled seeing some frocks in a smart shop near the Taj Mahal Hotel. She cautioned, though, that they might be very expensive. “My dear,” Gertrude said, “pay whatever you have to; I
must
have clothes!”

T
he heat had become unbearable, as if the city were smothered under a heavy, wet wool blanket. All of Basrah had taken to their roofs to sleep. Outdoors, in the middle of the night with the temperature at well over 100 degrees, Gertrude awoke to find herself and her silk nightgown in a pool of sweat. “Everything you touch is hot, all the inanimate objects—your hair—if that’s inanimate—the biscuit you eat, the clothes you put on.” Malaria and typhoid were on the rampage, and clerks, typists and servants “go down before you can wink.” Off and on through July and August Gertrude too was out with fever; in September she was stricken with jaundice.

For two weeks she lay limp as cloth, recuperating at an officers’ rest house on the river. She had never been so ill before. But by September 20 she was strong enough to sit outdoors on the hospital verandah, noting that she had done nothing but eat and sleep and read novels. Her reading ranged from romantic fiction to philosophical fantasies, from Anthony Hope at one end to
The Crock of Gold
at the other, and she asked that her favorite London bookseller send her four to six books a month.

Two weeks later, still at the rest house, she gladly put on a woolen dress. The heat had disappeared: it was now only ninety degrees and she was shivering. With the cooler weather ahead, her thoughts, naturally, turned once again to clothes. She requested a violet felt winter hat, a black satin gown, some thick silk shirts, a purple knitted coat, a white serge motoring coat, and a satin embroidered Chinese coat to wear as an evening wrap. Joyfully, she informed her father that she was finally receiving her copies of
The Times
, but for some reason, Smith & Sons had neglected to include her weekly edition of the
Literary Supplement
. “Would you mind asking him what the deuce he means by it?” she bristled.

She had been out of the office exactly one month, and when she returned in early October, she learned that her official reports had evoked accolades in London. She noted proudly a few weeks afterward that she had received complimentary letters from various people, including Austin Chamberlain. Only a short while later, on December 16, 1916, upon his departure from Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon would shower her with praise: “I welcome the opportunity … of recording my high appreciation of the services of … Miss Gertrude Bell.… Her intimate knowledge of Arabia, ability and energy, have rendered her services of great value. The manner in which she has so long devoted herself to the work of the Arab Bureau, under the most trying conditions of country and climate, is deserving of special notice.”

Her new duties now included acting as an intermediary between Sir Percy Cox and the Arabs, and it was this work which she found most satisfying: “I’m gradually becoming a sort of cushion between bewildered and mostly miscreant sheikhs and the ultimate authority,” she explained. Drifting for a moment to memories of Doughty-Wylie, she added pensively, “Yes, it has been a godsend all this. I can’t think what I should have done without it. And it stretches on into the future—but I don’t think of the future; to live today and then sleep, that’s enough.”

She hoped that in the not too distant future, a letter she was composing to Fahad Bey would bring some rewards. The Paramount Chief of the Anazeh, who controlled the land along the western borders of the Euphrates, had resisted British attempts at friendship. Even when an envoy had been sent to plead the British case, the sheikh had stubbornly refused to see him; his sympathy lay, as it always had, with the Turks. The Ottomans had long ago earned his loyalty by making his father a “Kaimmakam,” giving him the right to tax every caravan that crossed his land; Fahad Bey had inherited the title and the tribute that went with it. Nevertheless, since he had five thousand riflemen at his beck and call, Gertrude felt it worth her while to try to befriend him, and in the autumn of 1916 she sent a message to the tribal chief. It would be several months before she received a reply.

T
he intensity of the heat and the stress of war had taken their toll. Her hair was turning gray, and worse, when she washed it, it fell out in clumps. She had requested “two bottles of hair stuff” from Rudolfe on Sloane Street, but she feared her letter may have gone down with the
SS Arabia
: “Rudolfe might be asked if he got the letter, otherwise I shall be bald.”

Bald or not, by mid-November she had gathered enough strength to travel, and packing some food and clothes and portable furnishings, she took the night train for Qurnah, dining in an empty train car on tinned tongue and tinned pears, lunching the next day with the local sheikh to draw out some needed information. The following week she made an archaeological venture on the Euphrates, west to Nasariyah, to visit the mounds of Ur of the Chaldees. The ruins of the ancient town from which Abraham had taken flight were being threatened by railway engineers and army generals, and she took it upon herself to protect the site from their ravages. But an urgent event hurried her back to Headquarters: Ibn Saud, the sheikh she had wanted to visit for so long, was on his way to Basrah.

T
he legendary Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, husband of sixty-five wives, hero of swashbuckling exploits, including his escape from Kuwait, his seizure of Riyadh and his defeat of the Turks at Hasa in 1914, had earned the title of desert warrior and desert statesman. A commanding presence swathed in white robes and checkered
kafeeyah
, forty years old and massively built, six foot three inches tall, dark skinned, with black hair and black pointed beard, a straight nose and flaring nostrils, he arrived in Basrah on the night of November 26, 1916.

He came with Sir Percy Cox from Kuwait, where he had signed a treaty with the British and received investiture as Knight Commander of the India Empire. Three thousand rifles, four machine guns and a subsidy of five thousand pounds a month had been promised Ibn Saud in the hope of keeping him, the leader of the Wahhabi, the Bedouin Islamic fundamentalists, from attacking Britain’s new ally, the Sharif Hussein, guardian of Mecca and leader of the revolt against the Turks. Hostility had grown between the two Emirs with every incremental increase in Hussein’s power; now Ibn Saud resented furiously the Sharif’s recent claim to being the King of the Arabs.

On the morning following Ibn Saud’s arrival, surrounded by an audience of notables, the desert sovereign was presented with a jeweled sword in the name of the new British army commander, General Maude. There had once been hope that Ibn Saud would start the Arab rebellion, but the possibility had disappeared with the death of Captain Shakespear, a British agent killed in crossfire in the winter of 1915 while on a mission to see him; no treaty had been signed between the Emir and Britain. Sir Percy and the India Government officials believed that Ibn Saud represented the strongest weapon against the Turks. His victory over the Ottomans would have ensured him immediate control of all Arabia; furthermore, it would have kept Mesopotamia under the aegis of the India Government. But it was too late. The British Government in London and Cairo had backed the Sharif Hussein against the Turks. Now, at the very least, the treaty signed in Kuwait would keep Ibn Saud from attacking the Sharif. And if he fired his attentions on Ibn Rashid, so much the better.