Desert Queen (62 page)

Gertrude was taken aback. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Begin with a roof,” he answered, “supported by a few pillars. The roof will encourage us to continue. Otherwise the slowness of building may discourage us. Give us a king. He will be our roof and we will work downwards.” She took careful note of his words.

N
ovember’s cold weather coaxed her chrysanthemums to bloom, and although Marie had not yet had time to make new coats for the dogs, nor to sew a new winter gown for Gertrude, it mattered little; for the month that followed, the Khatun’s thoughts were focused mainly on the machinations of Sayid Talib. The most feared yet most able and influential representative on the Council, he took up everyone’s attention. One day he demanded to become Emir, the next day he threatened to resign. Jafar Pasha, she learned, had joined the Council just to make sure that Talib did not abscond with power.

Yet Gertrude’s own opinion of Talib wavered. In early December she called him “a rogue” and wrote to her father: “If they select him as Emir all I can say is they’ve got what they deserve. But they won’t,” she added, as if to reassure herself. The following week Sayid Talib paid her a call. “I must confess that he made a favourable impression on me,” she said. “He told me frankly that he wished to be Emir of Iraq. We discussed his position at length and I thought he showed wisdom and good sense.”

The Cabinet member whose wisdom she admired throughout was Sasun Effendi. “He is out and away the best we’ve got and I am proud and pleased that he should have made friends with me. One can talk to him as man to man and exchange genuine opinions.” Like other, though not all, Baghdadi Jews, he appreciated the treatment by the British and had prospered under the reign of the Turks during much of the Ottoman period. The ancient Jewish community, largest in the Middle East, had thrived since Babylonian times; its educational system reached the highest standards, its medical care was good, and its people flourished among the Arabs. To many, the cry for a Jewish homeland in Palestine struck a discordant note; it meant only trouble from the Arab world. That Sasun was anti-Zionist was not unappealing to Gertrude.

She was enraged that British money was spent on maintaining troops in Palestine. She wanted it for Iraq, and wrote home bitterly: “If they withdrew the two Divisions from Palestine we could keep them here for a couple of years where they’re so urgently needed. But no,” she went on vindictively; “there’s the Jewish interest to reckon with. The Jews,” she added spitefully, “can buy silence on the subject of expenditure.”

F
or several weeks while the Cabinet kept a close eye on the activities of Sayid Talib, it engaged in hot debate over whether or not to include the provincial Shiites in the Council. The Ministers looked to Gertrude for advice; even the Arab Government considered her the leading authority on the tribes. She knew that the big landowners on the Council, including the Naqib, would try to keep them out. Nevertheless, she thought it not only fair, but essential for the survival of the Arab Government, that the Shiite tribes be included in the Council. They did, after all, represent a majority of the population. If they were not included, there could be another major rebellion.

But if she bowed to their demand for representation, she did not fall blindly in the face of their claims. Indeed, she observed, they had to be controlled by a strong Arab army. “Mesopotamia is not a civilised state,” she explained to her father; “it is largely composed of wild tribes who do not wish to shoulder the burden and expense of citizenship. In setting up an Arab state we are acting in the interests of the urban and village population which expects and rightly expects that it will ultimately leaven the mass.” But until that time, an Arab force would be needed to control the tribes and maintain order.

E
very Arab, it seemed, whether townsman or tribesman, was finding his way to her door. “The number of heart to heart talks which take place in my office would surprise you!” she wrote glowingly to Hugh. “The Arabs who are our friends … constantly come to me, not only for advice on immediate conduct, but in order to ask about the future: ‘But what do you think, Khatun?’ ” Her response to them was far different from what it had been less than two years before, when she had urged caution. “I feel quite certain in my own mind that there is only one workable solution,” she explained to her father; “a son of the Sharif and for choice Faisal.” Yet among Iraqis there was not much sympathy for the Sharif. They scoffed at his assertion that he spoke for all the Arabs. They were Mesopotamian; he was from Mecca. They felt that he represented Britain; they wanted someone who represented them.

Nevertheless, now that the French had thrown Faisal out of Damascus, he was, she announced, “very very much the first choice.” His military experience in the Arab Revolt against the Turks, his administration of Syria, his diplomatic skills, his depth of character and his charisma would make him the perfect leader. Others might stand in the way, but she would do everything she could to ensure that none other than Faisal became the first King of Iraq.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
NINE

The Cairo Conference

“U
pon my soul I’m glad I don’t know what this year is going to bring. I don’t think I ever woke on a first of January with such feelings of apprehension,” Gertrude declared at the start of 1921.

The new year began with a torrent of rain, but it wasn’t only the weather and the political situation that made her apprehensive. Except for her closest colleagues, she had very few friends. (The only woman she was close to was Aurelia Tod, the Italian wife of Lynch’s representative in Baghdad.) She cared little for socializing, and her contempt had left her without much of a personal life. Even the entertaining she did was part of her work, and guests who failed to conform to her style were simply banished from her mind. In the middle of a dinner to which she had invited one of her favorite Political Officers, Major Dickson, and his young bride, Violet, she turned to another male guest and, switching from Arabic to English, announced, “It is
such
a pity that promising young Englishmen go and marry such fools of women.”

“As Harold had been one of her ‘promising young Englishmen,’ ” Mrs. Dickson commented later, “I felt most uncomfortable.” To the bride, the evening was long and miserable, her hostess “rather aloof and unprepossessing.” But when Gertrude wrote home, she declared the dinner a “real success.”

Coats of numbness had hardened her. Resilient before, she was impervious now, her passions buried in the war, in the tombs of her lovers and friends and family members, her sensitivity crushed by the vicious behavior of A. T. Wilson. She protected herself as she had learned to do as a child: pushing away the pain, consuming herself in her work. It had left her bitter and lonely. On Christmas Day 1920, alone in her sitting room, she scrawled to Hugh: “As you know I’m rather friendless. I don’t care enough about people to take trouble about them and naturally enough they don’t trouble about me—why should they? Also all their amusements bore me to tears and I don’t join in them; the result is that except for the people I’m working with I see no one.”

She had been to the Coxes’ to help prepare for a dinner that night, and to the Tods’ for a Christmas tea with twenty children—English, Circassians, Jews, Christians and Arabs—all playing together “as if they had been born and bred in the same nurseries.” But joyful gatherings like the ones celebrated at Rounton were long gone; she noted that this was her eighth Christmas away from her family.

Sir Percy Cox was the steady factor in her life, the “Rock of Gibraltar,” gentle but firm, courteous but determined. She worked closely with him at the office, lunched with him every day and relaxed with him sometimes on weekends, boating, picnicking or shooting. A man of few words, he rarely spoke but listened carefully to those with something to say. Her influence over him was increasing. In fact, it was becoming so great that Philby later observed, “Gertrude Bell exercised an excessive and almost mesmeric effect on his judgment and decisions.”

The closer she was to Cox, the more jealous her colleagues became; with few exceptions, the Political Officers used every opportunity to mock her. On a day when she was having coffee with visiting sheikhs and the conversation lagged, she asked one of the Arabs how things were going in the desert. “The wind is blowing,” the sheikh replied. After he left she quickly repeated his words to the High Commissioner. But the dangerous agitation she predicted turned out to be nothing more than an actual weather report, and for a long time afterward her message was used against her. “The wind is blowing” became a regular, in-house British officers’ joke.

R
eports of her brilliant opus,
Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia
, prepared by Miss Gertrude L. Bell, C.B.E., arrived mid-January in the newspapers from home. A literary achievement as well as a factual compilation, the official, 147-page publication had been presented as a White Paper to both Houses of Parliament. Loaded with anthropological, sociological, historical and political facts, it encompassed every important personage and explained every significant event that had taken place in Mesopotamia over the course of the six years since India Expeditionary Force D had entered Basrah, in November 1914, up to the current steps to establish an Arab Government. Beginning with a description of the lax and corrupt Ottoman rule, it went on, in highly detailed and descriptive prose, to account for the British occupation during and after the war; the problems with turbulent and pro-Turkish tribes; the difficulties in winning the loyalty of the sheikhs; the disaster at Kut; the occupation of Basrah, Baghdad, Mosul and the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, with their inflammatory religious leaders; the Anglo-French Declaration and the problems the British encountered up until the time of the mandate; the organization of the Civil Administration, including the establishment of schools and a unified educational system, the building of hospitals and medical care, the creation of a judicial system, the formation of a police corps, a commercial department and tax agencies; the pacification of the tribes during the 1920 uprising; the relations with the Arabs and the Kurds; and the nationalist movement.