Desert Queen (58 page)

It was time for Wilson to leave, she told Hugh. He had never supported the official policy of Arab self-government laid down in the 1918 Anglo-French Declaration; “he has in fact always ignored it. The people know that he isn’t in sympathy with it and don’t trust him.

“Meantime,” she admitted, “it may be I who goes. But I shall not send in my resignation. I shall only go if I am ordered. Thank heaven Sir Percy will be here next week, on his way to England, so I can consult him if necessary.”

Ramadan ended in the middle of June 1920, but the tribes still bellowed with defiance. When Gertrude rode out one morning to visit her Shiite friend Haji Naji, she found him in a state of agitation. The extremists had roughed him up and threatened him with more if he did not join the insurrection. Haji Naji had refused and had protected his house with watchmen, but he was worried. He begged her to come and visit more often. She would come “constantly,” she promised.

In several towns placards covered the bazaar, urging the people to rise up against the British. In the holy city of Karbala, where thousands of pilgrims had gathered for the Id al Fitr, the feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan, Islamic agitators whipped the people into a frenzy while a group of sheikhs and notables plotted a revolt for an Islamic state. In Kadhimain the son of the holy man Gertrude had visited was now firing up the town. Near Najaf a small tribe, known for stealing from Persian pilgrims, was robbing everyone on the road. In the north two large tribes attacked each other in a major raid; and along the southern Euphrates near Diwaniyah, the tribes, bombed from the air for refusing to pay their taxes, were now in open rebellion and had cut the railroad line in three places. Wilson responded by bombing villages, burning houses, machine-gunning insurgents, deporting instigators and imprisoning activists.

Wilson’s tactics were too harsh, Gertrude believed. In fact, they functioned like a pressure cooker: the more he bore down on the insurgents, the more their fury increased. But Gertrude was in the minority. At the office she was shunned for being too soft on the Arabs; Wilson spoke to her brusquely and refused to eat with her in the mess.

Within a few weeks the rebellion was in full bloom. Trouble had spread to Rumaithah, where Major Daly, the Political Officer in the southern Euphrates region, had arrested two leading local personalities and sent them down to Basrah by train. Knowing where they were, the Euphrates tribes attacked the train, rescued the prisoners and cut the railway lines. When two hundred troops were sent in to help the stranded soldiers, the Arabs captured at least one relief train and grabbed the guns on board. With only a limited number of railroad cars in Mesopotamia, the British resorted to airplanes, flying low and dropping food supplies for the troops. But the Arabs used the captured guns to shoot at the planes. “As far as I can make out,” Gertrude wrote, “the matter was pretty badly handled at the beginning, partly no doubt, because the whole of G.H.Q. was up in the Persian hills and refused to realise the importance of the rising.”

But if she blamed the army for doing little about the uprising, Wilson and his staff blamed Gertrude. Her earlier assurance to General Haldane, that there would be no more trouble, now cost her dearly with her colleagues. Wilson claimed their loyalty and admiration, and like him, they treated Gertrude with contempt. The Political Officers were solidly against her sympathy for Arab independence. In their view, Wilson’s tough policy was exactly right; Gertrude was mush in the hands of the Arabs. The Mesopotamians’ cry for independence only irritated their British colonialist ears. It was not accidental that
The Times
called Wilson “a sun-dried bureaucrat set on Indianizing Mesopotamia.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
SEVEN

An Unpleasant Victory

P
ercy Cox arrived in Baghdad toward the end of June, and for a brief moment, at least, Gertrude could breathe more easily. He was a rock she could cling to in a sea of turmoil. She saw him almost at once, breakfasting with his wife in the mess, and “felt as if a a load of care had been lifted.” The following afternoon, Cox came to her house after tea. She quickly informed him of what had been going on: the inflammatory preachings in the mosques, the extremists among the nationalists, the anger seething within the tribes and the antics of General Haldane (who had been upbraided by a sharp telegram from the War Secretary, Winston Churchill). She gave him what she believed was “the correct view of the whole Arab situation,” she wrote her father: that they had been forced to wait too long for an Arab government and an Arab ruler, and that the matter had been badly handled “for the last eight months.” But one subject she left untouched. She did not tell Cox about the ugly scene with Wilson. She regarded it as “sheer lunacy.”

In a meeting with Wilson, however, Cox asked how he and Miss Bell were now getting on. Wilson complained bitterly that she was still writing private letters to Asquith and others. It seemed to be driving him to a state of paranoia, Gertrude had noted. Nevertheless, she and A.T. had now arrived at a
modus vivendi
: Wilson sent her the usual papers, they ate together in the mess and he bent over backward to be polite, while Gertrude did the same. Afraid of setting off another fit of rage, she avoided A.T.’s office and offered him the minimal courtesy when he came to see her. “As he wants a good many things he has to come pretty often,” she sniffed. “And I laugh in my inside, for it’s my trick, isn’t it. In fact, I think it’s my rubber.” She was living in misery, but she had won the game: Cox told her he was coming back in the autumn as High Commissioner.

During his two-day stay in Baghdad, Sir Percy approved a statement drafted by Wilson calling for a Constitutional Assembly. The announcement declared that Mesopotamia was to be made an independent state under the guarantee of the League of Nations and subject to the mandate of Great Britain; Sir Percy Cox was to return to establish a provisional Arab government.

Cox set off for England the following day, leaving his parrot in Gertrude’s care, but carrying home half her major report for Parliament on the length and breadth of the British civil administration in Mesopotamia. With the government in London so upset over the cost of staying in Iraq, it was important to publish something, she explained, to show them the enormous amount of work that had been done. “Please will you do as much propaganda as you can,” she wrote to her father, hoping he would lobby Parliament on her behalf. And then she begged, “Don’t forget to go on loving me.”

F
or several months Gertrude had been urging Wilson to allow Jafar Pasha Askari, one of Faisal’s inner circle, to come to Baghdad and discuss the situation in Syria. Wilson had flatly said no. But now even he knew that steps had to be taken to placate the Arabs. Receiving official permission from Whitehall to call for the Constitutional Assembly, he invited Jafar Pasha to Baghdad. Yet Wilson refused to discuss the matter with Gertrude.

“I am rather in the dark about all this because A.T. never tells me anything,” she wrote home. “I fancy his chief idea is that I should be kept in my place, though what this is exactly no one can say.” The best policy was to avoid any discussions until Cox returned. She refused to let Wilson interfere with her work; instead, she sent him a memo suggesting a joint committee of Sunnis and Shiites from Baghdad be sent to the holy cities to try to quash the rebellious tribes. A.T. ignored her; she suspected he threw her memo in the wastebasket.

With the convening of the Constitutional Assembly, Sayid Talib also arrived in town. At one time a supporter of the Turkish group that rebelled against the Sultanate, he later turned his back on them, raising suspicion among some Mesopotamians. Known for his underhanded tactics, he was, nonetheless, an able politician, regarded by some of the Iraqi nationalists exiled in Syria as their spokesman. Now, he told Gertrude when he called on her, his interests and those of the British were the same. He aimed to cobble together a moderate party, for which he wanted British support. But Gertrude, more wary than the locals, refused to back him, saying, somewhat disingenuously; “We cannot bind the Arab government, once we’ve established it, to select any particular person as its head.”

T
he gathering of nationalist leaders in Baghdad did little to quiet the rest of the country. Reports came in that the tribes along the middle Euphrates were on a rampage, destroying the farms of Sunni townsmen in their wake. The Political Officer at Kufah was being held prisoner, and near Hillah four hundred English soldiers were attacked on a march; almost half were taken prisoner. The story of the incident flew through the country, and rumors of British weakness encouraged thousands of others to rise up in arms. The rebellion had raced out of control.

Panic spread among the Baghdadis: their vast country estates were being ravaged by the tribes; moreover, the threat of an Islamic state stared them in the face. The old hatred between the Sunnis and the Shiites had intensified. The townsmen were now terrified of the uprising, which, as Gertrude pointed out, they themselves had started with the Shiites in May during Ramadan. Two distinguished Sunni notables from Baghdad visited the Khatun in her office, seeking advice. She welcomed the turbaned magnates, offered them coffee and asked how she could be of help.

“Everyone in Baghdad praises you. What they say is—‘
if only their men were like their women!
’ ” they began, their flattery tipping her that they wanted something. They had come, she discovered, to find out whether anything could be done to pacify the tribes.

Gertrude suggested they form a joint committee of Sunnis and Shiites and pay a call on the leaders in the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. It was the same proposal she had made to Wilson ten days earlier, but she framed it in such a way that the Sunni notables thought it was theirs; despite their resentment at having to join forces with the local Shiites, they accepted her idea.

But when she talked to Wilson about it, he bristled. He would hear none of it from her. He would consider the proposal only if it was presented to him through the proper channels, by Captain Clayton (brother of her friend in Egypt), now a member of his (male) staff. Gertrude consented, but since Clayton had only recently arrived and was not yet acquainted with any of the local Arabs, she insisted on being allowed to sit in. Wilson bowed to her logic. When the session took place, she noticed, both Wilson and the notables took credit for the idea. But Gertrude knew better. As she had done so often, she silently swallowed her pride. “It’s my scheme from end to end,” she confided to her father.