Desert Queen (71 page)

“He seems to me so wise and unacademic in his appreciation of the Arab point of view,” Gertrude wrote in describing Cornwallis to Hugh. “I hope it’s not because he and I see eye to eye that I rate his discernment so highly!” Thousands of miles from his wife and children, he had separated himself from his family, not just by geographic distance but by environment and emotion. As it had for Gertrude, Iraq had become the central place, the central point in his life. Peering together through the same camera lens, she and Cornwallis focused on a similar picture.

On an afternoon when she invited him to tea, Gertrude sought his advice. Should she stay on in Iraq? she asked him anxiously. Sir Percy would be retiring in a year; after that, what role did he think she would play? And would she have a role at all? she wondered. Cornwallis replied in a steady voice, his calm demeanor a rock for her to lean on. They were the only two people in the foreign service of Iraq who had no ulterior objective, he said. Nothing but real necessity ought to call her away. Cheered by his confidence, she put aside her fears and finished her tea.

A
gloomy letter from England about her father’s declining fortune, and a bout of appendicitis suffered in Baghdad by Faisal, gave a damp start to the year of 1922, but the knowledge that her job was secure, at least until Sir Percy retired in 1923, and that she had the intimate confidence of Faisal and a growing friendship with Cornwallis, kept her spirits buoyed. By early spring her garden bloomed with daffodils, marigolds and wallflowers, her cook was serving up platters of ripened truffles and her wardrobe was replenished with new dresses and cloaks from home. And in February a parcel from England landed on her desk, and when she quickly tore it open, a diamond tiara rolled out. “I nearly laughed aloud,” she wrote to Florence, “it was such an unexpected object in the middle of the office files. But it’s too kind of you to let me have it. I’d forgotten how fine it was. I fear in wearing it I may be taken for the crowned Queen of Mesopotamia.”

To Hugh she wrote euphorically: “I want to tell you, just you, who know and understand everything, that I’m acutely conscious of how much life has given me. I’ve gone back now to the wild feeling of joy in existence—I’m happy in feeling that I’ve got the love and confidence of a whole nation, a very wonderful and absorbing thing—almost too absorbing perhaps. You must forgive me if it seems to preoccupy me too much—it doesn’t really divide me from you, for one of the greatest pleasures is to tell you all about it, in the certainty that you will sympathise. I don’t for a moment suppose that I can make much difference to our ultimate relations with the Arabs and with Asia, but for the time I’m one of the factors in the game.” She did not mention Cornwallis, but his affection underscored her joy.

Thinking back to the lost opportunities for marriage and children, she added pensively, “I remember your saying to me once that the older one grows the more one lives in other people’s lives. Well, I’ve got plenty of lives to live in, haven’t I? And perhaps, after all, it has been best this way. At any rate, as it had to be this way, I don’t now regret it.”

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either the Cabinet’s dismissal by Faisal, who had lost his patience with all the Ministers, nor a suspicious meeting in Karbala of the sheikhs and holy men, could shake her spirits. Her father was coming out to Jerusalem, and on the morning of April 29, 1922, Gertrude drove to the Baghdad airstrip. Skirting the rules against female passengers—“I’m an officer and I’m sexless,”—she climbed aboard one of the two British air force mail planes flying to TransJordan. From there she had hoped to travel with Hugh to Damascus, but the situation had become too dangerous. Even the flight to Amman was risky, she explained. “It’s clear that any journey of mine in Syria would be classed in their Criminal Investigation reports under the heading of Movements of Suspects.… Anyway I expect Father and I will be happy even if he has to come and hold my hand while I’m sitting in gaol!” Ironically, it was near Amman that the Turkish authorities had tried to stop her in 1914 on her way to Arabia, the very trip that had led to her imprisonment in Hayil and to her Intelligence work in Iraq.

After three weeks of travel through TransJordan, Palestine and Lebanon, Gertrude took leave of her father and headed home. On the six-hour flight to Baghdad, while the plane, battered by a north wind, sped at one hundred miles an hour, Gertrude stared out the window, following tire tracks in the sand, keeping count of the landing sites so that she would know where they were. “I fear I’ve become the confirmed aviator,” she announced after the plane touched down.

Faisal welcomed her back with an invitation to tea. Telling him what he wanted to hear, she reported how poorly the French were doing in Syria: their officials spoke no Arabic, had no personal relationships with the Arabs, and patrolled the streets with soldiers, “in deadly fear of an uprising.” She was convinced that Iraq was “the only Arab province set in the right path.”

The King asked her advice on an ultimatum he had received from Churchill. The Arab Government must accept the fact that in order to have the treaty of independence, they would have to accept the mandate, Churchill said, even though it guaranteed British control. If Iraq refused to accept those conditions, the Colonial Secretary announced, the British would pull out by Christmas. There seemed little choice but to go along with Churchill’s demands.

A short while later the King admitted that he owed his throne to the British and needed their protection; if they withdrew from Iraq, his Arab opponents would overthrow him. What’s more, the country would be eaten alive, the carcass torn apart by townsmen, tribesmen, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Turks all fighting for a piece of the territory.

Almost as soon as Faisal declared his consent, he changed his mind. Under pressure from the nationalists, he announced his willingness to sign the treaty, but only if it had equal status with, and was not subordinate to, the mandate. Iraq should be seen as an equal partner with Britain, he insisted, and he called for total abrogation of the mandate. But Churchill gave a brusque reply: Britain could conclude a treaty only with a mandate; that was the status given Iraq by the League of Nations under international law.

When a group of extremists held a demonstration against the British, Faisal refused to stop them, even showing support for the most radical of the nationalists. The Khatun had learned that, among his advisers, some had been trying to persuade him to declare himself an independent Islamic king; if he did, they assured him, the whole country would fall in line. Now he was succumbing to their advice. “The country will rally round him,” Gertrude had written Hugh, “but not because of a sudden and miraculous change of heart. What is needed is several years of stability and decent government, not a miracle but a reward earned by steady work.”

For more than a year she had struggled to make Faisal king, and now he was not merely destroying her work; he was destroying the special bond between England and Iraq. It was only with British support that Faisal could stay on the throne, and it was only through Faisal that the British could maintain their influence. Turning to Mr. Cornwallis, “her great standby,” as she called him, she discovered that, like her, he too was “feeling bitterly disillusioned.”

Distraught over Faisal’s bias toward the extremists, she decided to tell him exactly how she felt. When an invitation came for tea on June 4, 1922, she put on her dress and hat and steeled herself for a confrontation. Waves of heat rose off the ground as she made her way to the palace, and on the streets, sweat poured off the brows of men and animals. In the whitewashed reception room of the King’s house, the electric ceiling fans whirred with agitation. Faisal appeared, dramatic with his dark eyes and white robes, and when he welcomed her, she curtsied, but as she lowered her body, her eyes glowered angrily. Beneath the gracious formalities, she knew that Faisal knew how enraged she was. “I am playing my last card,” she told him flatly. Did he believe in her personal sincerity and devotion to him? she asked.

He could not doubt it, he answered, because he knew what she had done for him during the past year.

In that case, Gertrude announced, she could speak with perfect freedom. “I am extremely unhappy,” she said. “I had formed a beautiful and gracious snow image to which I had given allegiance and I saw it melting before my eyes. Before every noble outline has been obliterated, I prefer to go; in spite of my love for the Arab nation and my sense of responsibility for its future, I do not think I could bear to see the evaporation of the dream which has guided me day by day.”

She had believed the King to be moved only by the highest principles, she asserted, but she saw him now as victim of every malcontent and every form of malicious rumor. He listened to men who, during the war, had betrayed the Arabs who served the British, giving their names to the Turks, and tomorrow, when the British left and the Turks returned, these same men would turn around and betray the Arabs who served under Faisal. The King responded by taking her hand and kissing it.

When they had taken their tea, the King explained his position. It was his task to reassure the extremists, he said; better to rein them in than to let them run wild. But, he reminded her, the British had consistently refused to recognize them. That made his task far more difficult.

She replied calmly that there was no reason why a
modus vivendi
could not be found; if only the King would lend his support to the mandate, they could live together in harmony. He would, Faisal finally said; he promised to try.

Pleased by what had transpired, Gertrude rose to leave, and taking Faisal’s hand, she tried respectfully to kiss it. But the King demurred. Instead, with great affection, he embraced her.

“I’m still
sous le coup
of this interview,” she wrote when she arrived at her house. “Faisal is one of the most lovable of human beings but he is amazingly lacking in strength of character. With the highest ideals, he will trip any moment over the meanest obstacle—he has hitched his wagon to the stars, but with such a long rope that it gets entangled in every thicket. You can’t do anything with him except by immense personal sympathy—it isn’t difficult to give it to him, but one must remember that he veers with every breath. I’ve left him tonight convinced that my one desire is to serve him; tomorrow he will be full of doubts. But at the bottom of his mind, with many deviations from the course, he trusts us and believes that one or two of us—Mr. Cornwallis and I and Captain Clayton for instance—would go to the stake for him and that’s the strongest hold we have with him.”

Two days later Faisal had veered back toward the extremists. “Oh the King, the King,” she wailed. “If only he would be more firm. He is missing the opportunity of a lifetime—but what can one do?”

A
fortnight later, when another invitation arrived from the King, Gertrude grabbed the new parasol sent by her sister Elsa and, making her way to the palace, mulled over what she would say. Her worries were needless: it turned out to be “the most interesting talk” they had ever had.