Desert Queen (42 page)

Even worse was to be sitting idle in Basrah, yet, much to the disappointment of Lawrence and Hogarth, she had no desire to return to work in Cairo. Her feelings of loyalty toward Mesopotamia were growing, and equally important, her loyalty was becoming stronger to Percy Cox. As Hogarth wrote to his sister: “I hear from Gertrude Bell at fairly frequent intervals—She is still working hard and, as usual, feeling more and more under the influence of her chief. She varies in spirit apparently, which I expected.… Still, when you are as much behind the scenes as she is, things are not always so great as they are dished up to appear and I daresay I shall hear less jubilance from her. She has had several fever attacks evidently and would be the better for a time off in India or here … but she won’t leave her present God.”

The British now occupied Baghdad, and Gertrude waited impatiently to join Cox. On March 10, 1917, moments before the troops officially proclaimed the city taken, she wrote that she hoped to be called there very soon. The taking of Baghdad meant the end of the German dream of dominating the Middle East and the first big British success in the war. “We shall, I trust, make it a great centre of Arab civilisation, a prosperity; that will be my job partly, I hope, and I never lose sight of it.” She reminisced about Baghdad and longed to hear exactly how it appeared. It was just three years since she had arrived there from Arabia, “3 lifetimes they seem as I look back on them.”

Yet if anyone in her family harbored suspicions that she was homesick, she reassured them that, in spite of the drawbacks, “I would far rather be in the East among surroundings which are a perpetual interest to me, places and people which have no sharp edge of memory.… It has not been easy, in many ways. I think I have got over most of the difficulties, and the growing cordiality of my colleagues is a source of unmixed satisfaction.”

Of all her colleagues, the friendliest at the moment was General MacMunn. He returned from Baghdad with a purse of stories to tell her, and together, almost every evening, they sailed on the river or motored out to the desert. As they lounged on his yacht one evening, he turned to her and asked what part she intended to play in the future of Mesopotamia. “I think I shall have to keep an eye on it,” she answered. Within a few days, she received word to come to Baghdad. Sir Percy Cox had already given her the title of Oriental Secretary, the key Intelligence post. Now she could keep her eye on the future.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

Baghdad

B
aghdad seemed as gossamer as the nighttime breeze, as alluring as the tales of
The Thousand and One Nights
. It was here, in the tenth century A.D., in the time of Harun al Rashid, that Scheherezade kept her murderous husband at bay, here that she spun her stories of beguiling women and lascivious men, here that she told of golden palaces and silver ponds, eunuchs and slaves, Ali Baba and Aladdin.

The citadel on the Tigris, built by the Abbassid Caliph Mansur eight centuries after the birth of Christ, one century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, flourished for five hundred years. The heart of the Abbassid empire, it was the largest, most prosperous city in the world. More than a million people, of every imaginable race, color and creed, filled its narrow streets, worked in its shops, bathed in its bathhouses, gossiped in its coffeehouses. Sophisticated and cosmopolitan, the Baghdad of a thousand years ago boasted of bookstores and literary salons, banks and commercial houses, gardens and zoos. Its writers and poets produced some of the Arab world’s greatest literature and translated into Arabic the works of Euclid, Plato and Aristotle. Its mathematicians, calculating in Arabic numbers, introduced the concept of zero; its scientists built an astronomical observatory and studied the round surface of the earth; its physicians earned their degrees in medical schools and served in public hospitals; its businessmen cashed checks at bank branches as far away as China. The cargo ships that sailed its river carried in gold from Africa, silver and spices from India, porcelains from China, pearls from the Gulf. Traders from East Africa arrived with ivory; desert caravans from Turkestan brought in slaves. In return, Baghdadi merchants exported to the world the finest cotton shirts, thick cotton towels, fanciful turbans of colored silk, healing oils and potions, excellent swords, fine leather goods and paper.

But history had swept it nearly all away. The tyrannical force of the Mongols, the feudal rule of the Persians, the corrupt occupation of the Turks and the plagues and floods of the nineteenth century had wiped out most of the city. When the British troops rode in, in March 1917, they found only two hundred thousand people—mostly Sunni Muslims and Jews—living in shabby buildings inside the crumbling city walls. Yet, as they do today, here and there grand Ottoman buildings of yellow brick, two or three stories high, stretched across acres of green grass; slender minarets and domed mosques glittered in the sunlight; statuesque palm groves fringed the city. Verdant gardens brought relief from the dry hot sun, and the perfume of jasmine, roses, oranges, lemons, peaches and pomegranates wafted through the early morning air.

It didn’t take long for the British to spiffy up the place with horse races and polo matches, cribbage and dominoes, afternoon tea and lawn tennis. Gertrude arrived in April, pleased as punch to be part of the action. Not that it had been easy: General Maude, newly appointed Military Commander of Mesopotamia, had been determined to keep her away. He wanted no woman in Baghdad, least of all an official. But Sir Percy Cox came quickly to Gertrude’s defense: she would be treated the same as the male members of his staff, he informed the general, and she could render services beyond the power of anyone else. As Cox struggled to organize a civil administration, replacing lax Ottoman rules with strict new laws, new institutions, new agencies, he needed Gertrude to act as his link to the people. Besides, she was not like other women.

E
xactly three years had passed since her last trip to Baghdad from Hayil. Exhausted from the trying journey to Arabia, dejected over her failures either to find important archaeology or to meet the warrior Ibn Saud, she had come out of the desert in 1914 bearing an enormous sense of defeat. Now she came to Baghdad as a victor, jubilant over her own success in Intelligence, exultant over her country’s success in capturing the city. Masses of roses and cries of congratulations greeted her as anti-Turkish Arabs celebrated their liberation by the British.

Nevertheless, confusion followed. Against the advice of Cox, a flowery proclamation from London, read aloud, invited the Arabs of Mesopotamia to participate in the new government so that they could unite with the rest of the Arab peoples. But to the Mesopotamians, the proclamation raised more questions than it answered. What kind of government would be formed? How much independence would the Arabs have? What kind of connection would there be between themselves and the people of Syria and (what is today Saudi) Arabia? How would their future unfold? Would the Turks return? From the point of view of most of the Arabs, another foreign conqueror, heretic and Western, had come into their land, evicted their Muslim occupier and claimed the local people to have been liberated. Then, like all the others, it established itself as the ruling authority.

Anxiety abounded as people from all parts of Mesopotamia came to the city. A crush of visitors flocked to the British Residency, an Ottoman building that still stands along the Tigris. Old acquaintances and nervous petitioners swarmed the great courtyard outside. Indoors, clusters of black-robed women huddled on the floors, bearded sheikhs in flowing robes and braided headdresses waited on the sofas, white-haired elders and aspiring magnates paced the hallways, turbaned holy men and landowning sayids gathered in the inner courtyard.

Gertrude organized a space just outside Sir Percy’s office where, as “official strainer” of Kokus (as Cox was now called by the locals), she interviewed the Arabs. Her job was to assuage the fears of all and assess the influence of each. Trustworthy civilians had to be found to serve the newly formed agencies. Notables and holy men, rich or influential, had to be befriended to win their loyalty. Tribal sheikhs, leaders of great numbers of people, had to be subsidized financially to gain their allegiance. Unknown tribesmen from the fertile Euphrates Valley, whose grain was needed to feed the civilian and army populations, had to be filtered out and appraised for their importance.

Her work, as she described it to her parents, was “the gathering and sorting of information,” and though she was also given the role of Curator of Antiquities, her main title was Oriental Secretary. As the Intelligence expert and chief adviser on Arab affairs, she analyzed the power and politics of the local leaders, evaluated their links to the enemy Turks, judged their potential loyalty to the British. Within two weeks of her arrival she had already prepared maps, tribe lists and confidential reports on Baghdad’s Personalities. “That’s not bad going,” she crowed. Not allowed to give more details of her highly sensitive work, she assured her family that she was content, happy at last to be eating fresh butter, yogurt and milk, pleased that the job was “a thousand times more interesting” than in Basrah. She was soon writing long reports on Turkey for the War Office, composing articles for them on Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, compiling Intelligence reviews, sending off essays for the secret
Arab Bulletin
, analyzing tribes, Shiite traditions and more.

Dressed in her frilly skirts and flowered hat, she paid a call on the elderly Naqib of Baghdad. The white-bearded Abdul Rahman al Gailani, chief religious figure of the Sunni community, and member of a family line reaching back to the Prophet, held a prominent role in the city, and indeed his power was nearly worldwide. It was a rare privilege for an unveiled woman even to be allowed in the Naqib’s presence, yet she had been to his grand house on the Tigris several times in the past. Now, when she entered the columned, brick courtyard, and the robed and turbaned holy man received her with open arms, his welcome had even more significance. Her high position in the government confirmed her status as an “honorary man.” The locals respectfully called her El Khatun, “the Lady” to some, the “lady of the Court who keeps an open eye and ear for the benefit of the State” to others. Yet in the eyes of the Arabs, her female gender all but disappeared when they heard her discourse knowledgeably on the complicated politics of the day. “A very shrewd woman,” remembers one of the men she dealt with; “very, very, very, very, very, very shrewd.”

She relished every moment. Days after her arrival, she marched off in search of a place to live, dismissing the house that had been assigned her as “a tiny stifling box of a place.” In a busy part of town, across from the great arched building of the Lynch Company, the British export-import firm, she poked her head behind a blank wall and discovered three small summer houses set in a rose garden. The place needed work. But with help from the owner, her friend Musa Pachachi, a wealthy landowner from one of the city’s most prominent families, she added a kitchen and a bath, hired a cook, a servant and a gardener. By May, she was settled in the first house of her own, living merrily under the blossoms, cooled by the breeze coming off the river just a block away.

Her life took on a pleasant routine. Awake before six, eager for exercise, she dressed in her breeches and bowler and rode her favorite pony along the river bank, sometimes toward the desert, sometimes to the gardens of Haji Naji. Six or seven kilometers outside the center, those vast gardens now comprise most of the diplomatic embassies and some of the commercial streets of Baghdad. The proprietor, Haji Naji, a slim, handsome Shiite, quickly became her friend, keeping her abreast of Shiite attitudes and offering her his counsel, along with fresh fruits and honey from his orchards. Their morning picnics soon became the talk of the city, and rumors flourished, as they do today, that their friendship had turned into romance.