Desert Queen (51 page)

At Faisal’s house she also met Jafar Pasha. A fat, jolly man, he was nonetheless a judicious authority and outstanding soldier who had won military honors from both the British and the Turks. Jafar, who was of Kurdish origin and came from Mosul, was fluent in seven languages—English, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Persian—and tested her in all. (She did well in the first five, had never learned Kurdish, and had forgotten most of her Persian.) Knowing of her affection for the Arabs, he asked her to help him return to Iraq. She promised to try. “He is an honest man who would be useful to us,” she noted correctly, “and said to be by far the most capable administrator in the Arab Government.”

Nuri Said had been Faisal’s chief of staff in the Arab army and held a similar role in Faisal’s court. Born in Baghdad to a father who was an attorney, he was reserved and more of an introvert than Jafar but, like him, highly Westernized. The two men made a good team. They had met in military school and formed a strong bond, made even stronger by a pact to marry each other’s sister. If Jafar had the common touch, Nuri was politically more shrewd. Gertrude wrote with foresight, “Probably the best of them, a man of considerable intelligence.” Continually loyal to the British, Nuri would serve as Prime Minister under fourteen different Arab Governments in Iraq.

In a letter to her parents Gertrude described what she had seen in the city. Wherever she went, the desire for self-determination, “the Spirit of 1919,” had overtaken all. “If the French won’t recognize it, there will be risings and massacres and Heaven knows what.”

By October 12, her stay in Damascus complete, Gertrude went on to Aleppo, where she found her old aide-de-camp, the loyal Fattuh, living with his wife in a tiny, rented house. He was still suffering from the war. “The Turks dropped on him,” she wrote in her diary, “because he was my servant.” He had lost weight, his once round face was now haggard and he had aged a great deal. His years of service to the woman who had become a leading intelligence agent for the British had cost him dearly. Nonetheless, he was delighted to see her and, after warm embraces, told her what had happened. Drafted twice into the Turkish army, he had managed to buy his way out; but later he had been imprisoned and then impoverished by the Turks. Stripped of his two homes, his garden, his horses and even his carriages, he was drained of everything, forced to earn a meager living by carting wood.

He still had some of her camp kit from their desert travels, and pulling out her old plates and cups, he prepared a picnic for her motor trip to Iraq. Her old equipment brought to mind much happier days. “Oh Fattuh,” she said, “before the war our hearts were so light when we traveled; now they are so heavy that a camel could not carry us.”

Smiling, he answered good-naturedly, “My lady, no, a camel couldn’t carry you.”

“My poor Fattuh,” she grieved and gave him some money, promising to help him rent a garden from the Muslim authorities. They hugged again, and she left for Baghdad, unaware that in her absence A. T. Wilson had used his authority and abolished the Arab Bureau office in Baghdad. And in an ominous letter to a colleague in London he had written: “I shall be interested to know what Miss Bell is going to do when she comes here. She will take some handling.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
THREE

A Change of Thinking

A
wave of happiness surged through Gertrude as the motor car approached her walled house and lurched to a stop. Eight months had gone by since she left for the Paris Peace Conference, and she hurried to see her garden—a riot of zinnias, marigolds and chrysanthemums. Her villa, with its narrow columns in front, had been improved with the addition of new rooms; and her servants, happy to have her back, came running out to greet her. Word spread like wildfire that the Khatun had returned, and within hours of her arrival a stream of notables flowed through her doorway. She was home, happy to be there, amidst the familiar sights of the Tigris and the date palm groves, the familiar sounds of Victoria carriages clopping along the Baghdad streets, the familiar smells of fresh baked bread and sweetened turnips floating through the Mesopotamian air.

Now, besides seeing people, what she wanted to do most was to write her Syrian report.

At the office, visitors filled her days, taking up too much of her time, she complained. She had already been to see the Naqib, the holy man, informing him of what she had learned in Paris and London and on her trip through the East, and she had paid a condolence call on the family of one of her Arab friends, Abdul Rahman Jamil. Although he had been dead for a month, the women of the family were still in deepest mourning, his wife and sisters dressed in somber black, their hair shorn, their cheeks covered with streaming tears. “I’m very sorry he’s dead,” she wrote to Florence, adding tartly: “But I’m glad he won’t have the opportunity of doing it again, so that I shall not have to pay another visit of condolence. It was awful.” No one, she remarked, “unless they determine to do so, can cry solidly for a month.” She seemed to forget how long she mourned for Doughty-Wylie.

T
he influx of five hundred and fifty British wives, children and relatives, given permission to arrive after the war, had dramatically changed the lives of the British officials. “Brides come out in swarms to be married here,” she wrote. Two weddings took place just after she came back. A social whirlwind was sweeping the town, and she was carried along, in her new clothes, to a round of receptions and teas given by British, Muslim and Jewish women. A public library was being built, a law school opened, a female ward built in the civic hospital and a school opened for Muslim girls. But all too soon her colleagues’ wives became a moaning brigade complaining about the heat and the dust, the sloppy mud, the awful food, the horrible Arabs. “These idle women” were getting on her nerves, demanding that she pay them social calls, yet when she asked them to attend ceremonies for the Arabs, they refused to come. “They can think what they like about me but I won’t bother about them any more,” she wrote angrily to Florence.

She was more at home among the Arab men than among the British women. When, in early November, her colleague Sir Edgar Bonham Carter hosted an at-home for Arab notables, Gertrude was one of only five British officials invited to attend. She arrived, dressed in a high-necked, long-sleeved gown and frilly hat, and looked around the room: fifty Arab men were seated in typical fashion, chairs arranged in a circle. As soon as they saw her they rose, and she walked around the room, going from one to the next, shaking hands, knowing them all by name, saying something significant to each. How was his wife? she asked. How was the health of his eldest son? What was the state of his crops? What did he think about the political situation?

Not only did she enjoy the company of the Arab men (and used their friendship in her work), but her special status appealed to her snobbishness. Toward the end of November, she was invited to visit one of the most learned Muslims in Baghdad. The notable did not like the British, yet he always treated her as a friend. “He doesn’t consort with Europeans at all,” she wrote home, but “he had a select little party to meet me. I must say I feel a sense of personal triumph when I sit in that house as an intimate.”

Her own house was more comfortable than ever: with some good bargaining in the bazaar, she had acquired a charming black cupboard and a chest; her maid Marie, who had just arrived by ship, was sewing curtains and busily fixing up the rooms; her new cook was preparing vegetables from the garden. She wished only that the new furniture and crockery she had ordered from Maples in England would arrive so that she could increase the size of her parties. With her staff in place, she hosted dinners for friends like Frank Balfour, the new Governor of Baghdad, Bonham Carter, the Justice Minister, and General MacMunn, the Commander-in-Chief. Whoever the guests, she dominated the conversation. Her voice deep from the smoke of tobacco, her eyes sparkling, her enthusiasm boundless, she magnetized the men. Her conversation leapt from French to English to Arabic; it bounced from politics to gossip, from the attitudes at Whitehall to how best to administer the Arabs; from how to do the newest dances, to the number of stitches to the inch in the finest Persian carpets, to the proper way to dine in the tent of a sheikh, to the excavations at Babylon, to the horse given her by General MacMunn, to the pair of salukis—tall, slender, silken-haired dogs—that had just arrived from Fahad Bey. “On any subject that arose,” said the enchanted Sir George MacMunn, “she was sure to be interesting and entertaining.”

B
ut before it all, she worked on her report. Reviewing for the Foreign Office what she had seen and heard, she detailed everything on her trip, from Zionism to nationalism, emphasizing the Arab Government that stretched from Damascus to Aleppo and the importance of the Arab nationalist cliques. At last, after toiling in her office late into the night, every night for three weeks, she finished. Ending with a lengthy analysis of Syria, she dated her report November 15, 1919, and signed it
GLB
.

Her ideas had turned almost one hundred and eighty degrees from where they had been before her trip. She had gone from believing the Arabs could never rule themselves to seeing them govern themselves in Syria. She had gone from denying the notion that there is an Arab nation comprised of one Arab people to seeing the fervor of Arab nationalism in Palestine and in Syria. She had gone from assuming that Britain must stay in total control to recognizing the need for it to cede considerable authority. With General Clayton’s help in Cairo, she had seen the light: compromise would prolong British importance, not reduce it. The more the British helped the Arabs achieve self-rule, she now proposed, the longer the British could retain their economic and political influence. The paper marked a seminal change in her thinking.

It was useless to speculate on who was to blame for the current situation in Syria—the British installation of an Arab government while the French claimed control—or why it had happened, she wrote: “A more profitable line of thought lies in the direction of considering how the twelve-month existence—even if it fails to exist longer—of an independent Arab State [in Syria] has affected and will affect Mesopotamia. It is true that the Arab administration [in Syria] has left much to be desired, and equally true that it has been artificially financed by our subsidy to the Sharif; but it has presented, nevertheless, the outward appearance of a national Government; public business has been kept going, tramways have run, streets have been lighted, people have bought and sold, and a normal world has been maintained.” If Faisal’s government failed in Syria, she said, the Arabs would blame the British for their lack of support as much as they would blame the French for their aggression. “If it crumbles … its failure will be attributed, not to inherent defect, but to British indifference and French ambition.”

Referring to the Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918, which promised self-determination to the Arabs, she wrote, “We have stated that it is our intention to assist and establish in Syria and in Mesopotamia indigenous governments and administrations. I believe that events of the last year have left us no choice in Mesopotamia.” Yet, she acknowledged, the choice was not an easy one. “Local conditions, the vast potential wealth of the country, the tribal character of its rural population, the lack of material from which to draw official personnel will make the problem harder to solve than elsewhere.” But, she could envision no other response. “I venture to think that the answer to such objections is that any alternative line of action would create problems the solution of which we are learning to be harder still.”