Desert Queen (49 page)

Exhilarated by Faisal and Lawrence (she had not heard his nasty remark) and by her own important role in representing Mesopotamia, Gertrude was swept up at once in the frenzy. The air was tainted with anxieties and conspiracies over the Arabs: muddled misunderstandings, complicated by the conflicting promises of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which gave Syria to the French), the McMahon-Hussein letters (which promised an Arab kingdom to the Sharif Hussein), and the Balfour Declaration (which promised a homeland in Palestine to the Jews). All these were further splattered with the need for oil; the purported petroleum wealth of Mesopotamia was causing much excitement. It left the loquacious Gertrude nearly speechless.

A few nights later, alone in her room, she sat at the desk and wrote to her father: “I’ve dropped into a world so amazing that up to now I’ve done nothing but gape at it without being able to put a word onto paper. I’m not going even now to tell you what it’s like partly because I can’t—but it is clearing up a little. Our Eastern affairs are complex beyond all words and until I came there was no one to put the Mesopotamian side of the question at first hand.” She had talked that day with Lord Milner, had plans to lunch with the questionable Mr. Balfour and utimately hoped to catch Mr. Lloyd George. “If I can manage to do so I believe I can enlist his sympathies.”

Her immediate task, she continued, was to speak to the French delegation. “The Mesopotamian settlement is so closely linked with the Syrian that we can’t consider one without the other,” she explained, “and in the case of Syria it’s the French attitude that counts.” There was so much to do, she needed help. A. T. Wilson was coming from Baghdad, and she suggested summoning Hogarth. As soon as they arrived she proposed to include them with herself and Mr. Lawrence to form a solid Near Eastern bloc. In the meantime she would tell her story to plenty of people in Paris, among them her friends Domnul Chirol and Sir Robert Cecil. And, despite his asides, T. E. Lawrence was at the top of her list as an ally.

If most British officials were repelled by Lawrence and his kinship with an Arab emir, Gertrude found him appealing. If most thought him difficult, she thought him dynamic; if most found him obstreperous, she found him enchanting. True, before the talks she had told a friend she thought Lawrence an “inverted megalomaniac,” but Lawrence alone could understand her passion for the East. After they dined with Domnul at the Paris home of
The Times
’s editor, Wickham Steed, she wrote admiringly to Hugh, praising T.E.L.’s explanation of the situation with Faisal and the Syrians on the one hand and the French on the other: “He did it quite admirably. His charm, simplicity and sincerity made a deep personal impression and convinced his listeners.”

Sometimes separately, sometimes together, Gertrude and Lawrence raced around town, from the Majestic to the Crillon to the Élysée Palace, rushing from one conference to another. After one frigid morning in the office of Arthur Hirtzel, where she huddled close to the hot water pipes and reading reports, Gertrude hurried to keep a lunch date with Lawrence. Standing in the hall together, they spied Lord Milner, a close adviser to Lloyd George. “You go and ask him to lunch with us,” Lawrence urged her. Boldly, she went up to the minister and invited him to join them. Milner said yes. It was a delightful lunch, unofficial and open, she reported, but realizing that he had said too much, Milner made them promise they would not quote him. “We assured him that people who lunched with us always were indiscreet,” Gertrude wrote. “It’s Mr. Lawrence, I think, who induces a sort of cards-on-the-table atmosphere.”

Lawrence laid his own cards on the table when he confided in Gertrude about the book he planned to write. He hoped it would clear up the myths promulgated by Lowell Thomas. He sought her advice on how to treat the tales: whether to embellish them with the stories that had surrounded him as the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, or to go with the lesser truth and be diminished by the facts. Ever the one for truth, Gertrude assured him his book was a splendid idea and encouraged him to proceed with his work on
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
.

Gertrude was spending most of her time with Lawrence. When her father arrived for a weekend stay, she took him to lunch with her “beloved boy,” and they discussed the situation in Syria. Hugh, friendly with some of the Americans, introduced his daughter to President Wilson’s delegation and, during several days of lunches and dinners, she expounded on the Arabs, trying to teach the Americans something about the subject and persuade them to take over the mandate from the French. Temporarily, at least, the results seemed good: on March 25, the Americans announced they would send a commission to the region to study the situation. Upon hearing the news, the abstinent Faisal toasted them with champagne. “The Arabs would rather die than accept the French mandate,” he told an American delegate. (The American King-Crane Commission took three years to issue its report, keeping the United States out of the political hotbed until it was too late to have an impact on events.)

Just after her father left, Gertrude dined with Harold Nicolson. She had known Nicolson and his bride since 1914, when they were newlyweds in Constantinople. Now he was part of the British delegation, and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, had reluctantly agreed to join him briefly. Their marriage was beginning down its rough road. Vita, in the midst of a romance with Violet Markham, had refused to leave her lover; in three years more, she would begin her affair with Virginia Woolf. “Mrs. Vita was over for a day,” Gertrude scrawled. “She is a most attractive creature and would be more so if she didn’t whiten her nose so very white.”

Aside from such fluffy gossip, however, her talk stayed mainly in the realm of the East. Frantically working the hallways, lobbies, restaurants and conference rooms, grabbing the arm of anyone she could, she lectured him on the Arabs. She knew more about the desert and its people than anyone else, including Lawrence, said Domnul. When A. T. Wilson arrived on March 20, he immediately recognized how difficult her work was. Dismayed to discover how little was known about the region, he later wrote:

“Experts on Western Arabia, both military and civil, were there in force, but not one, except Miss Bell, had any first-hand knowledge of Iraq or Nejd or, indeed, of Persia. The very existence of a Shiah majority in Iraq was denied as a figment of my imagination by one ‘expert’ with an international reputation, and Miss Bell and I found it impossible to convince either the Military or the Foreign Office Delegations that Kurds in the Mosul
vilayet
were numerous and likely to be troublesome, that Ibn Saud was a power seriously to be reckoned with or that our problem could not be disposed of on the same lines as those advanced for Syria by the enthusiasm of the Arab Bureau.” Indeed, while Wilson was still in Paris, word arrived that the Assistant Political Officer posted in northern Mesopotamia had been ambushed and killed by the Kurds. The incident was dismissed, but it foreshadowed much trouble with the northern tribes.

Wilson’s accolades for Gertrude were but a momentary applause. As firmly as he believed that the only solution for Mesopotamia was a British High Commissioner, she was beginning to lean toward an Arab head of state. Numerous hours with Lawrence and Faisal had planted the seed that a Sharifian ruler was not only good for Syria; it was the best answer for Iraq.

Squalls of anger arose between the colonialist A. T. Wilson, fighting for the British to hold on to power, and Lawrence, whom he blamed for Britain’s problems with the French. Wilson sighed with relief when he learned that, at the end of the negotiations, Lawrence planned to return to England and retire. After the conference had ended, the oil agreements were made, the League of Nations was established, the remains of Eastern Europe were divided up and a covenant adopted that called for mandates over formerly Turkish territories, the delegates departed; but the Arab issue hovered like a giant question mark in the air. Little had actually been ensured; instead of putting Syria and Mesopotamia firmly into French and British hands, the negotiators, deeming the issue too difficult to settle, deferred, in true diplomatic style, for two years, to another time and another place.

G
ertrude had left for Belgium to meet her father, where he had gone for a well-deserved rest. After a month she was finally back in London, catching up on new books, having fittings for new clothes. The styles had changed dramatically, as she had already discovered; the long dress lengths that she cherished were replaced by skirts just below the knee; the long evening gowns were now cut low in the back. She ordered one new dress fringed with ostrich feathers, the latest rage, and, instead of the old stiff fabrics, she tried on knitted silks and wool jerseys, worn with sheer stockings and the new pump-style shoes. At the milliner’s she chose a brimmed hat piled with plumes and one of the tricornes that had just come into vogue.

She shopped, she read, she dined with friends. It was four years since she had seen them, and one of her Oxford colleagues—David Hogarth’s sister, Janet—described her afterward: “She had aged a bit, her bright hair had silvered, and she looked like finely tempered steel.”

At the beginning of June 1919, Gertrude retreated to Rounton. On long walks with her father or when riding through the rolling fields, swimming, gardening or just talking with friends, she could work off the tensions of the long war and the current frazzle of Eastern politics. With time to reflect on what she had learned, she sat at the desk in her childhood room and wrote lengthily to Wilson, summing up:

“This letter has been all business but I am going to end with a little sentiment … all these things have happened since I last sat in this beautiful room of mine, lined with books and looking out on an exquisite country-side. I cannot recapture the former world which this room and its books stood for, nor can I ever quite lay to rest the anguish which lies between that world and this, but I can, and I do, accept with wonder and gratitude what the new world has given me, and in that you play a large part—you yourself, and the Service of which you have made me feel I am one.”

Toward the end of September, with her new wardrobe stashed in her trunks and her maid Marie in tow, she launched once again for the East. Sailing on the
Nevasa
, she dressed on a warm morning in comfortable muslin and searched for a place away from the other passengers. Finding a quiet spot, she stretched out on the wooden deck chair, took out her writing kit and penned a note to her father. “I’m glad to be plunged into Arab politics again and almost to think I’m a person,” she wrote. “It’s very curious to be part of the official East. I always used to wonder what it must be like to be coming on a ship of this kind and not to be an outsider. I find it quite amusing, not having had too much of it.”

She planned to return to Baghdad via Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo. It was important to examine the local problems for herself, to see and hear what the Arabs felt about the French, about the British, about the Turks, about the Zionists, about Arab nationalism. At the end of her trip to Egypt and Syria, she would write an official report. She had no idea of the trouble to come.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
TWO

The Arab Mood

A
s Gertrude arrived in Cairo, the thick warm breeze held the fragrant scent of bougainvillea and the fragile hope of rebirth in the Arab world. Local Egyptians, clad in thin
djallabahs
, shuffled along the sandy streets on either side of the Nile, ignoring flies that swarmed around them as they stopped to buy sugarcane from street vendors; women, balancing stacks of baskets on their heads, brushed past scrawny donkeys and sad-eyed oxen dragging overloaded carts.
Feluccas
, ancient-style Egyptian boats, sailed silently along the river, while the rumble of modern trams and motor buses competed with the singsong sound of the street hawkers and the wails of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.