Desert Queen (53 page)

She grieved, too, over the situation surrounding Mesopotamia. To the north, the Turks, frustrated that no peace treaty had yet been signed with Britain and France, were embracing Bolshevik propaganda; and the Kurds were co-operating with anyone ready to massacre Christian heretics. To the west, the Arab Government in Syria, bound to fail without financial aid, was angry and unwilling to accept the help of the French; while Egypt, whose nationalist yearnings had been ignored by officials in London since the end of the war, had been torn apart, she wrote, “turned into a second Ireland, largely by our own stupidity.” And Mesopotamia was up for grabs:

“This country, which way will it go with all these agents of unrest to tempt it?” she asked. “I pray the people at home may be rightly guided and realize that the only chance here is to recognize political ambitions from the first, not to try to squeeze the Arabs into our mould and have our hands forced in a year—who knows? perhaps less, the world is moving so fast with the result that the chaos to north and east overwhelms Mesopotamia also. I wish I carried more weight. I’ve written to Edwin and this week I’m writing to Sir A. Hirtzel. But the truth is I’m in a minority of one in the Mesopotamian political service—or nearly—and yet I’m so sure I’m right that I would go to the stake for it. They must see; they must know at home. They can’t be so blind as not to read such gigantic writing on the wall as the world at large is setting before their eyes.”

But as firmly convinced as she was that an Arab government had to be created in Iraq, Wilson and his team of officers were adamantly opposed. Shunned in the Political Mess, where the men snidely referred to her walled house as Chastity Chase, she sought refuge inside her home. Standing at the window, stroking her dogs, she looked out at her garden and watched the mulberry trees drop their leaves.

T
he trouble up north continued. Faisal’s government, like the British, did not want to divide the tribes around Dair by drawing boundary lines. But the renegade Arab, Ramadhan al Shallash, who had seized control and held the British officers hostage at Dair, acted in defiance of Faisal and pushed his authority harder. He declared that the British had to withdraw their occupying forces fifty miles below their existing lines in Anah, and, he announced, he was sending his forces farther north, on the attack toward Mosul. He collected taxes inside British territory, sent threatening letters to the Political Officers, excoriated the sheikhs under British control, encouraged the tribes to rob and raid, and spurred on his men to hijack and plunder the Baghdad gold merchants as they transported their goods across the desert from Syria. The British threatened reprisals and machine-gunned the insurgents.

The tensions continued into February 1920, growing only more hostile and dangerous when Ramadhan al Shallash was replaced by Maulud al Khalaf, another, even more prominent, member of the nationalist al Ahd al Iraqi. Then the entire situation grew murkier. It was difficult to understand whether Faisal’s government in Damascus had succumbed to nationalist pressure and was waging war on the British in Iraq, or whether the trouble was coming from some anti-Faisal, extremist nationalist group.

To make matters worse, officials in Cairo, despite Gertrude’s pleas, were still not sending up-to-date information about either Egypt or Syria. “We get no news from Egypt,” she complained to Domnul in London, “though they must know more about Syria than we do. We don’t know whether Faisal has returned nor whether he has come to terms with the French.” But Arab tribesmen, whom she knew from earlier days, were beginning to trickle down from Aleppo. In exchange for official favors, her informants were providing her with news about Syria and Turkey.

“I’ve got a very complete system of intelligence with the Agail of Baghdad,” she wrote to Domnul in early February, “and I don’t think many people of interest arrive without their letting me know.” As for circumstances in Mesopotamia, she told him, “if, when we set up civil government, we do it on really liberal lines, and
not be afraid
, we shall have the country with us.” The key was to protect the rural, tribal population from the Baghdadis, who knew and cared nothing about the tribes. The Arab officials, she explained, would almost invariably be townsmen—Baghdadis and Syrians—because there was no other educated class. “And the tribes (mostly Shi’ahs remember), hate them.”

Animosity and suspicion defined the relationship between the educated townsmen, who were mainly Sunnis, and the nomadic tribesmen, who were mostly Shiites. And more and more it defined the relationship between Gertrude and Wilson. On February 9, 1920, she received a letter from Sir Percy Cox in Persia, dated three months earlier, and hastened to open it. She read:

“Dear Khatun, It is good to know that you are back; how I wish we could forgather and have a confab. What a lot you must know of the doings of the mighty! … Your welcome letter of August 7th took three months to reach here.”

She noticed a note scrawled on Cox’s letter, the handwriting, Wilson’s: “Miss Bell—what an extraordinary long time this has taken to come.” Wilson was reading her mail!

Even worse, unbeknownst to Gertrude, he had been writing about her to Cox, first in December, then in January, complaining bitterly of her letters to government bigwigs. To Gertrude, her letters home seemed perfectly natural. But Wilson regarded her correspondence with deep suspicion. He wanted her sent home. The situation had become so tense and she had become so distraught that, responding to Sir Percy’s letter, she even suggested it herself.

S
ayid Talib arrived in Baghdad at Wilson’s invitation. It was true that, as an Iraqi native and the son of the Naqib of Basrah, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, he was seen by many Arabs and even some British as the most logical candidate to rule the country, but he was feared and hated by many others. Gertrude had met him in Cairo in 1919 and was suspicious of him then, when he expressed a desire to come back to Iraq. He was still the one nationalist she really despised. Nevertheless, she wanted to gain his confidence; better to know what he was thinking than have him sneaking around her back. She attended a big Arab party for him (she was the only woman) and hosted a dinner in his honor.

Invited to dine at her table were British and Arabs, among them Sir Edgar Bonham Carter, Major Humphrey Brown, the Mayor of Baghdad and a son of the Naqib. As the candles flickered and wine glasses were held up in toasts, the conversation crackled with energy. The mustachioed Talib, well traveled and polished from years of living abroad, was as dignified and charming as he could be, but was known to be a man who killed those in his way. As Gertrude led the discussion, they talked about Syria, the tribes in the north, the problems in Egypt (where he had lived in exile for the past five years) and the current conditions in Baghdad. And then, coquettishly, she turned to her right and asked her guest of honor, “Tell me, Pasha, how many men have you done to death?” Politely Sayid Talib answered, “Nay, Khatun, it’s difficult after all these years to give the exact number.”

He was, she wrote, “the cleverest and perhaps the greatest rogue unhung … probably the best known man in Mesopotamia—a
succes de crime
—Talib is as sharp as a needle, nothing escapes him, and if he came to Baghdad to see how the land lay, why he has seen.” He had been given a cooler reception than in the past. Later she would freeze him out entirely.

For now, he was a mere intrusion; she had more pressing matters on her mind. Shiite holy men in Karbala and Najaf in the south had banded together with notables from Dair and Mosul in the north to incite rebellion against the British. In early March 1920, they sent their representatives to an Arab Congress in Damascus.

The religious leaders’ influence was undeniable; their hold over their followers, tenacious. The British wanted to be in touch with them, but communication had been impossible. The Shiite holy men had been overtly hostile; attempts by the Political Officers had met with blank rejection. Even Gertrude had been cut off, because, she explained, she refused to wear a veil: “Their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil—I think I’m right there, for it would be a tacit admission of inferiority which would put our intercourse from the first out of focus.” Nor did it do her any good to try to make friends through the women: “They would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see,” she remarked on the confusing problem of gender, “I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other.”

Yet it was essential to make contact. If the Shiite religious leaders could be persuaded to stop inciting holy war against the Christian infidels, or, at least, if they could be convinced to start a dialogue with the British, then progress could begin toward a peaceful solution. After months of ingratiating herself, in March she was invited by a leading Shiite family for a visit to Kadhimain. The third holiest city in Iraq was just eight miles from Baghdad, yet “bitterly pan-Islamic” and bitterly anti-British. Accompanied by a Shiite from Baghdad, Gertrude walked along the town’s narrow, crooked streets, the only European among the black-shrouded women, stopping in front of a small mysterious archway, hesitating and following for fifty yards through a pitch-dark, vaulted passage, until she reached the courtyard of the house of the holy man, Sayid Hassan.

The place was at least a hundred years old, its upper floor enclosed by wooden latticework, its rooms all opening onto the inner court, surrounded by a pool of silence; no hint of the outside world could be felt. The holy man’s son appeared, a sinister-looking figure in black robes, black beard and black turban, and bade her welcome. The old divine himself, Sayid Hassan, a formidable figure with a long white beard that reached to his chest and a huge dark turban on his head, awaited her inside.

Gertrude folded her skirt and squatted cross-legged on the carpet. No other woman had ever been invited to drink coffee with such a holy man or listen to him discourse. She wanted to make a good impression. As was his way, the old man began to speak. But never one to merely sit and listen, Gertrude joined in, and they spoke of many different things: of his family, the Sadrs, considered the most learned family in the entire Shiite world; of their branches in Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia; of books and book collections in Cairo, London, Paris and Rome. He showed her his library catalogues from every city, talking “with such vigour,” she noted, “that his turban kept slipping forward on to his eyebrows and he had to push it back impatiently on to the top of his head.” They spoke for nearly two hours, until, finally, she brought up the subject of Syria. She told him everything she knew, including the latest telegram she had just received, saying Faisal was about to be crowned king in Damascus.

“Over the whole of Syria to the sea?” the holy man asked.

“No,” she replied; “the French stay in Beirut.”

“Then it’s no good,” he said, wiping his hands, and they discussed the matter from every angle. From Syria they jumped to Bolshevism and she observed that it was “the child of poverty and hunger.” The
mujtahid
agreed, “but,” he added, “all the world’s poor and hungry since this war.” Gertrude added that the Bolsheviks wanted to sweep away everything that had been built before, but the problem was they had no knowledge themselves of the art of building. Again he agreed.

The conversation seemed to have come to an end. She made signs of leaving, but the holy man stopped her. “It is well known that you are the most learned woman of your time,” he said, “and if any proof were needed it would be found in the fact that you wish to frequent the society of the learned. That’s why you’re here today.” She thanked him profusely, and amidst “a shower of invitations to come again,” she rose to go. She had established a line of communication with the influential Shiite leader. Her visit had been a success.