Gertrude Bell (43 page)

Hardinge was deeply impressed by her. The blunt-spoken, opinionated young woman whose company he had enjoyed in Bucharest had become a skilful diplomat, able at the same time to promulgate a view and remain receptive to a barrage of counter-opinions. He was impressed by her rigour and her grasp of a situation she had been exploring for only six weeks. Her work for Britain was far from over, he felt. He now made a plan that was to change her life—and, indeed, change the shape of the Middle East. He suggested that she should go to the current hotspot of the war, to Basra on the Shatt al Arab, at the convergence of Mesopotamia, Kuwait, Arabia, and Persia. Her job would be to act as liaison between Cairo and Delhi intelligence, and at the same time work up a detailed report on the Mesopotamian tribes and their affiliations. At the most difficult moment in the Mesopotamian advance, she should do her best to convince the local Arabs to cooperate with the British.

It would be, he warned her, a most awkward job for a woman—and a woman in an unofficial position—to pull off. She would be working at General Sir Percy Lake's military headquarters. Lake's chief political officer was Sir Percy Cox, Britain's most distinguished official expert on the Middle East, in the employ of the Indian government. If and when Baghdad was taken, Hardinge did not have to tell Gertrude, Cox would
move up there and establish an administration. Gertrude knew Sir Percy and Lady Cox from a couple of meetings through their mutual friends, Sir Richmond and Lady Ritchie. Cox had been the Resident in the Persian Gulf when, on vacation in London, he had lunched with Gertrude and advised her strongly against the dangers of an expedition to Hayyil, especially from one of the ports of the Gulf, which were under his jurisdiction. Would Cox, she wondered, resent the fact that she had so famously made it to Hayyil four years later, albeit approaching from the north-west instead? She told her parents: “The V. is anxious that I should stay at Basrah and lend a hand with the Intll. Dept. there, but all depends on what their views are and whether I can be of any use. That hangs on me, I feel—as we have often said, all you can do for people is to give them the opportunity of making a place for themselves. The V. has done that amply.”

There would be, of course, as there always had been, considerable opposition on the part of intelligence and military staff to accepting a woman among them as an equal. As Hogarth had told the Cairo office when they asked how she should be treated and to what she could be admitted, “
She'll
settle that!” Hardinge warned her of the probable difficulties in Basra, pointing out that it was up to her whether she could make a permanent job for herself. He then wrote to Cox, advising him to take Gertrude seriously. The words he chose deserve to be inscribed in the annals of chauvinism, and would have brought an ironic smile to Gertrude's lips had she known of them: “She is a remarkably clever woman,” he wrote “. . . with the brains of a man.” And writing of her later in his memoirs: “I warned her that being a woman her presence would be resented by Sir Percy, but that it rested with her by her tact and knowledge to make good her position. As I anticipated, there was serious opposition at Busra, but as is well known she, by her ability and her obvious good sense and tact, overcame it.”

When Gertrude has occasionally been described as unfeminine—and nothing could be further from the truth—it has to be remembered what she was up against in these exclusively male official and military circles. Challenged on their own ground by a woman who was so often right, some of the old buffers she had to work alongside fell back on attacking her sexuality. These were often the same patriots and colonialists who, like Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, the Inspector-General
of Communication in Mesopotamia, referred to the Arabs in private as “the Frocks.” MacMunn would become friendly with Gertrude, then a critic. He was so wide of the mark generally as to refer to the brilliant and wayward T. E. Lawrence as having “a simple desert mind,” incapable of meaning anything more complex by the word “Arab” than “the patriarchal tribes of the desert, the sheik in all his imperative wantonness, with his blood horses, his apparelled camels . . . and the like.” To MacMunn, Lawrence was not attuned to “the difficult situations” arising in Damascus and Baghdad, and Gertrude was a “little wisp of a human being, said to be a woman,” who became far too important for the good of the administration. In her turn, Gertrude cared not a jot whether someone were gay, eccentric, or weirdly motivated, whether they had sixty-four wives or worshipped the devil, but simply drew the best from every personal encounter, and passed on. She did not demean herself by describing these petty prejudices in her letters home, for she always had more interesting things to write about, but let slip the occasional brief remark that suggests how very tired she became of dealing with such misogyny and having to prove herself again and again. “It's not easy here—some day I'll tell you about it,” she wrote to Hugh. “I think I have got over most of the difficulties and the growing cordiality of my colleagues is a source of unmixed satisfaction.”

And so Gertrude arrived at the intelligence branch of the General Headquarters at Basra without title, job, or pay, not knowing whether the department she was visiting would keep her there or instantly send her away. The town, an ugly jumble of mud-walled houses and palm groves punctuated with irrigation channels, had had to expand into a large army base almost overnight. Every room and office was packed with soldiery, and the atmosphere was charged with the excitement of impending action. Sir Percy Cox was away for a few days, but Lady Cox was welcoming and helpful and put Gertrude in their spare bedroom until she could find a home. There was no office for her, though. She was expected to work in the bedroom of a Colonel Beach, who was in charge of military intelligence. This space was shared during office hours with Beach's pleasant assistant Campbell Thompson, who had also worked with Hogarth and Lawrence at Carchemish.

She began to read the files she was given, engaged an Arab boy, Mikhail, as her servant, and submitted herself for the time being, but
with a raised eyebrow, to the rules: her mail would be censored, she was limited as to where she could go and what she could do, and if she visited Arabs in their homes she had to be accompanied by an officer or chaperone. She tried to be as little trouble to Lady Cox as possible, by lunching at the mess and booking a room at GHQ. It was very different from the stimulating life of the Bureau, and she was tempted to return to Cairo where she knew she was wanted. The days passed monotonously: “I wish I ever knew how long I was going to stay in any place or what I were likely to do next. I fall to asking myself what I am really doing here,” she wrote. “. . . At the end of a week I look back and think I've perhaps put in one useful word . . . And if I went away it wouldn't matter, or if I stay it wouldn't matter.”

Sir Percy returned and she was no longer bored. Immediately he congratulated her, with some amusement, on her successful expedition to Hayyil. He would not underestimate her again. Tall, with silver hair and a broken aquiline nose, he was fifty-one, four years older than Gertrude. A product of Harrow and Sandhurst, he was much respected, an urbane, persuasive, and civilized man who shared Delhi's worries about Cairo's fostering of an Arab revolt. He had served in the region as Agent for the government of India for nearly a decade. Whatever his immediate reaction to this woman's arrival at a military base at this particular juncture, he was far too intelligent a man to advertise his prejudices. With Hardinge's letter in mind, he decided to throw Gertrude in at the deep end. He arranged for her to have lunch, on 9 March, with the four generals in charge of the military advance in Mesopotamia. It was Military Intelligence she was supposed to be working for. If she had “the brains of a man,” he might have told Lady Cox over his morning coffee, then let Gertrude explain herself and convince the military of her use and professionalism.

It was a test, almost an audition. The local command were dumbfounded and pre-programmed with a hatful of prejudices against the curious interloper who had abruptly appeared amongst them for no apparent reason. Now, they were expected to find something for her to do. Generals Lake, Cowper, Money, and Offley Shaw of the India Expeditionary Force would have preferred to continue to ignore her. Asked to entertain her to lunch in the officers' mess, they were generally prepared to assess her both as a woman and as a job applicant. The little woman
was, they understood, quite a famous traveller. They had spotted her hat bobbing along the pavement as she passed to and from the room where she was working—whatever she was supposed to be doing there. They had heard that she was a friend of that effeminate and insubordinate excuse for an officer, Lawrence. They leaned back in their chairs and laughed at their little jokes about spinsters. An Arab revolt! As if the Frocks could pose a military challenge! It was tacitly understood between them that they would patronize her, be gallant, make a little quiet fun of her views, then continue to ostracize her.

Challenge brought out the best in Gertrude. She was in her element. She entered briskly, they stood up, they all sat down, and before they could marshal their thoughts she began to talk. And she talked them down, while managing to strike, as she always did, the right note. She spoke their military language, she mastered her facts strategically, she spoke with authority, and above all she knew her stuff. She lightened her lecture with humour, and she dominated the table. Then she listened, took the long view, let slip a few names, flattered them just a little, and outlined a few crucial tactical and administrative differences between the Indian Muslims and the Bedouin independents of the Middle East. The generals were surprised, and a little seduced. They called for cigars, and Gertrude fitted a cigarette into her holder. They began to reflect on why this woman had been sent to Cairo and Delhi in the first place, and then, on the express wish of the Viceroy himself, on to Basra.

She did not let the lunch run on too long. She had, she indicated, plenty to do. She smiled warmly, thanked them pleasantly, and swept out, leaving a faint aura of English lavender in the smoke-filled air. After the lunchtime break she went back to work. As she approached her “office,” she saw to her consternation that her files were being taken out of the house and piled into a cart. A mystified Captain Thompson stood on the porch, remonstrating. The servants explained they had orders from headquarters. Gertrude drew herself up for battle. Together, she and Thompson went along to General Staff to find out why they were being ejected. All affability, a staff officer ushered them through the building on to a spacious wooden veranda overlooking the river through a screen of leaves and flowers. Opening onto this airy space, with its wicker chairs and coffee tables, was a wide, cool room with fans whirling over a couple
of large desks. The cases along the walls had already been filled with the books she and Thompson had amassed. Servants passed them, loaded with their files, papers, and books. This was to be their new office. She wrote home:

Today I lunched with all the Generals . . . and as an immediate result they moved me and my maps and books on to a splendid great verandah with a cool room behind it where I sit and work all day long. My companion here is Captain Campbell Thompson . . . very pleasant and obliging and delighted to benefit with me by the change of workshop.

She had passed the test. She was in. She was about to become a salaried Indian military staff officer.

The generals had decided to like Gertrude, and she quickly became a favourite with the military. In the steaming heat of midsummer, when the floods were up and the whole country was under water, Generals Cowper and MacMunn—the latter to become Commander-in-Chief in Mesopotamia in 1919—took her off for a few days in a river steamer to north of the Shatt al Arab, to visit the country of the Marsh Arabs. The steamer had rudimentary cabins on deck, made of wooden screens; Gertrude took a servant and her camp furniture. They anchored in the Hawr al Hammar lagoon, where the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates join. She was fascinated by the waterscapes and the strange architectural beauty of the reed-built floating houses and
mudhifs
, or village centres, imposing buildings some fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide. This was the ancient waterborne culture that would obsess Wilfred Thesiger throughout the early 1950s, and that, in his time, Saddam Hussein would destroy. She wrote to Chirol on 12 June:

To the south we could see the high edge of the desert and the great ridge of mounds which is Ur of the Chaldaes . . . The villages are not stationary, but shift as the flood falls and rises. Many are built on a floating foundation of reed mats, with floating farm-yards, on which the cows stand contentedly anchored, I must suppose, to palm trees . . . over each reed-hut village rose the square mud tower of the shaikh's fort, like squat church towers in a land of flooded fen. The light and colour were beyond belief—I never saw a landscape of such strange beauty . . . I am burnt to a cinder.

They found that Nasiriyeh, which had just been taken by the British, had turned into an island three miles long. There she met General Brooking—“a fiery little man with a broken heart who lost his only son four months ago in France”—and a Major Hamilton, who turned out to be a cousin of the Stanleys. Charming interlude though it was, certain things worried her. Whenever the local telegraph line was cut, her fiery general was dealing out indiscriminate punishment to friend and foe alike. Her letter to Chirol continued:

I need not say that it is called strafing. The amount of damage you can do by shelling from the water is almost negligible, and it is always followed by reprisals which get more and more people into trouble—an ever widening circle of unrest and hostility. That's what I think and I made bold to tell him so. “You've been living with the Politicals,” he said, half a snort and half a twinkle. I said why yes, I had lived with Politicals all my life.