Desert Queen (63 page)

It had taken Gertrude the better part of a year to write, and it won accolades in England. Nevertheless, she was more than a little annoyed at the sexist tone of the praise. Intellectually, she may have viewed herself as a man and even prided herself on being accepted by men as an equal, but being a woman, a capable woman herself, was never in dispute.

She wrote home angrily: “I’ve just got Mother’s letter of December 15 saying there’s a fandango about my report. The general line taken by the press seems to be that it’s most remarkable that a dog should be able to stand up on its hind legs—i.e. a female write a white paper. I hope they’ll drop that source of wonder and pay attention to the report itself, if it will help them to understand what Mesopotamia is like.” She wanted it clearly understood that the request for the report had come directly to her from the India Office and not, as suggested on the cover page, from A. T. Wilson. Moreover, she wrote, “I insisted, very much against his will, on doing it my own way, which though it might not be a good way was at least better than his. At any rate it’s done, for good or bad, and I’m thankful I’m not in England to be exasperated by reporters.”

But other events in England soon aggravated her even more: the debate over Mesopotamia had taken a bad turn. Severe unemployment from the post war Depression had brought on a taxpayers’ revolt; the public was fed up with the expense of supporting Britain’s newly mandated areas in the Middle East. Winston Spencer Churchill, now Colonial Secretary, had suggested that, to protect the oil interests in Persia and the route from Egypt to India, the base at Basrah should be maintained. But due to the high cost of keeping troops in the region, he proposed that the British pull out of the rest of Iraq. Gertrude and Cox found the notion absurd.

“As far as statecraft I really think you might search our history from end to end without finding poorer masters of it than Lloyd George and Winston Churchill,” she scoffed to her father. She had already suffered enough from Churchill’s poor decisions: his resolve to send in troops at Gallipoli had killed Doughty-Wylie. Now she foresaw, at his whim, the destruction of Mesopotamia.

In the face of such a threat, Cox had composed a letter to Whitehall explaining the risks of abandoning Iraq and the impossibility of keeping only Basrah. At Gertrude’s urging, and in the hope of quickly establishing a solid Arab government, he suggested choosing Faisal as Emir. On the morning of Sunday, January 10, Cox called Gertrude to his house. She found him sitting in the dining room, where he handed her a telegram he had just received from Churchill. Mortified by what she read, she went home and whisked off a note to Hugh:

“
EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL.
We have reached, I fear, the end of the chapter.… H.M.G. had placed the decision as to their policy in Mesopotamia in the hands of the Secretary of State for War and he therefore informed the High Commissioner and the Commander in Chief that he could not burden the British public with the expenditure necessary to carry out the programme suggested—i.e. Sir Percy’s recent proposal that we should bring about the selection of Faisal as Emir of Iraq, that being, in his view, the one hope of establishing speedily a stable Arab Govt and reducing the British army occupation.”

It was impossible, she insisted, to establish a native government without British support. And she still chafed at Wilson, calling him the source of the problems. From the day in May when he had first spoken contemptuously of an Arab Government, she explained, the nationalists had intensifed their anti-British campaign. It was true that the idea of a
jihad
appealed to the masses, and the prospect of looting and not having to pay taxes inspired the tribes, but, she emphasized, “A.T. stands convicted of one of the greatest errors of policy which we have committed in Asia—an error so great that it lies on the toss of a halfpenny whether we can retrieve it.”

A few weeks later everything changed.

Pressed by the fury in England over the cost of Mesopotamia alone—twenty million pounds sterling for the year of 1920—combined with the confusion in Baghdad over who should become Emir—a son of the Sharif Hussein or Sayid Talib or even a Turkish prince—and the dilemma over what to do with Palestine and TransJordan, Churchill summoned a small group of Orientalists to Egypt. The British Empire’s best minds on the Middle East would determine the fate of Mesopotamia, TransJordan and Palestine. From England, Churchill called in Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard of the RAF; Kinahan Cornwallis, an Intelligence expert attached to the Finance Ministry in Egypt; and the newest member of his team, the fair-haired, formerly retired Arab expert Colonel T. E. Lawrence. From Palestine Churchill sent for High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Wyndham Deedes; from Aden, General Scott; from Somalia, Sir Geoffrey Archer, who brought along two baby lions destined for the Cairo zoo; from Persia, A. T. Wilson, now representing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; from Arabia, General Ironside and Colonel Trevor. And from Mesopotamia he summoned Sir Percy Cox and the only woman among the forty official delegates, Miss Gertrude Bell.

By the middle of February Gertrude was preparing for the urgent conference in Cairo.

To represent the Iraqis, two members of the Council were picked to join the delegation: Jafar Pasha and Sasun Effendi; Sayid Talib, to his great disappointment, was kept at home. The night before they left, however, they all dined with Talib. Gertrude reported: “Amid potations of whisky he whispered in my ear in increasingly maudlin tones that he had always regarded me as his sister, always followed my advice and now saw in me his sole support and stay. And I, feeling profoundly that his ambitions never will and never should be fulfilled, could do nothing but murmur colourless expressions of friendship.” The following morning, February 24, 1921, the group was off, sailing down the Tigris, and after dinner that night, Gertrude sat down with Percy Cox, Major Eadie and Jafar Pasha for the most popular form of Baghdad evening entertainment, a game of bridge.

At Basrah, where they switched from the boat to a ship, Gertrude rushed off to see the Van Esses. A warm welcome, lunch with her friends, and the conversation turned to the rebellion still weighing heavily on their minds. For seven years John Van Ess had lived as a missionary among the Euphrates tribes that had started the 1920 uprising; he was certain, he said, that the roots of the revolt were not in a struggle for nationalism but in a war of religion, an ongoing battle between Shiites and Sunnis. He had supported Wilson’s harshest measures and, even less to Gertrude’s liking, was a fan of Sayid Talib. Nevertheless, she appreciated hearing his analyses. “There’s no one better to talk to than Mr. Van Ess,” she wrote to Florence.

A
s the Mesopotamian delegation sailed to Egypt on the
Hardinge
, Winston Churchill walked briskly past the crowds at Victoria Station, and slipping into his private compartment on the boat train, he lighted a cigar and set to work. “I’m going to save you millions,” the Colonial Secretary had promised the press. Only a few days before he had noted to Parliament that the great success of the Allies in World War I, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent possession by the British of Palestine and Mesopotamia had pushed England into a situation of enormous responsibility. It had come at a high price, he told them: twenty-five million pounds just to fight the rebellions and ward off anarchy and chaos in the Mandates. Now he would do something to cut the cost. He would establish an Arab Government in Mesopotamia and ease the burden on the British public.

G
ertrude stood in her striped silk dress and silver fox boa, looking out from beneath her flowered hat, and in the hall of the familiar Cairo train station she spotted her old chum Lawrence, come to meet them. With the huge success of Lowell Thomas’s lectures and the publication of Thomas’s book,
Lawrence of Arabia
, T.E.L. had become world famous; for the first time since they met, he was more well known than Gertrude. “Dear Boy,” she cried out, extending her gloved hand to the shy and awkward fellow. “Gertie,” he greeted her and looked around. “Everyone Middle East is here,” he said.

A horse-drawn carriage took them to the palm-fringed Corniche, the road overlooking the Nile, and on the way they could hear Islamic students from al Ahzar University chanting anti-British slogans. Inside the Semiramis Hotel, a sense of expectation fluttered through the lobby. For days the staff had bustled about, feverishly polishing brass, watering potted palm trees and flowering plants, readying rooms, scurrying across the marble floors delivering telegrams, carrying hatboxes, toiletry cases and steamer trunks, ushering in a glittering array of distinguished guests.

Gertrude led Lawrence to her room. During the 1920 uprising in Mesopotamia and the debate over the cost of the mandate, Lawrence had written letters to the British press, sometimes praising, more often condemning the work of the civil administration in Baghdad. “I’m largely in agreement,” Gertrude had written back to him at first. But as the weeks wore on, his criticism grew more hostile. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour,” he wrote unfairly in
The Sunday Times
. “Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” Gertrude responded angrily, rightly describing his ideas as “tosh” and “pure nonsense.” Now the pair enjoyed “a private laugh over two of her letters, one,” Lawrence explained, “describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil.”

They discussed the costs of Mesopotamia and the need to withdraw some troops, and they agreed that, with an Arab Government installed, Great Britain could begin to decrease the size and expenditures of its administration. Most important of all, in the confines of the Semiramis Hotel they conspired over Faisal as the future ruler of Iraq. Lawrence had already smoothed the way with Churchill in London, and Gertrude had done the same with Cox in Baghdad; now they would work together to make sure the man they wanted was anointed Emir. An hour later they emerged from her room, and while Lawrence drifted off, Gertrude went with Sir Percy to pay a courtesy call on the Churchills. The following day, Saturday, March 12, 1921, cloaked in a shroud of secrecy, with not a single word to the press, the Cairo Conference officially opened.

“I’ll tell you about our Conference,” Gertrude wrote to Florence two weeks later. “It has been wonderful. We covered more work in a fortnight than has ever before been got through in a year. Mr. Churchill was admirable, most ready to meet everyone halfway and masterly alike in guiding a big political meeting and in conducting small political committees into which we broke up.”

O
n the first day of the sessions, as the Political Committee convened at the table, Gertrude puffing on her cigarette, Churchill puffing on his cigar, Percy Cox described the events in Baghdad over the past five months: a Provisional Government had been established, and the Naqib invited to form a Cabinet. Now without delay, he said, an announcement had to be made that a new authority would soon replace the provisional Council of State. The delegates concurred that the new authority must be an individual ruler. But who? The Naqib of Baghdad was mentioned, and the names of Sayid Talib, the Sheikh of Muham-marah, even a relative of the Turkish Sultan were tossed around; almost without argument, they were dropped. With the McMahon-Hussein promises of an Arab kingdom for the Sharifian family still hanging over them like a cloud of conscience, the best choice, the group agreed, was a son of the Sharif.