Gertrude Bell (62 page)

The receptions and dinners continued, most magnificently at the Naqib's house, the old man tottering to the head of the stairs as Faisal approached, where they formally embraced, then walked hand in hand towards the standing guests. Gertrude sat at Faisal's right. “It was a wonderful sight, that dinner party,” she recorded, “. . . on the open gallery, the robes and their uniforms and the crowds of servants, all brought up
in the Naqib's household, the ordered dignity, the real solid magnificence, the tension of spirit which one felt all round one, as one felt the burning heat of the night.”

On 11 July the Council of State, at the request of the Naqib, unanimously declared Faisal King. Cox, though greatly relieved, knew that a referendum must be held, so as to confirm Faisal as the choice of the people. He and Gertrude had already framed the question—“Do you agree to Faisal as King and leader of Iraq?”—and printed the papers; they would be circulated to a large number of tribal representatives, including three hundred notables.

Gertrude was becoming a frequent visitor at Faisal's apartments. She would be ushered straight in through a thronged waiting-room by his British adviser, the tall and handsome Kinahan Cornwallis, whom she was beginning to regard as “a tower of strength.” Faisal spent his days in meeting people from all corners of the country, and his evenings attending or hosting dinners, entertaining as many as fifty guests at a time. The important Jewish community honoured the Amir with a large reception in the Grand Rabbi's official house. Many of them had had reservations about an Arab king, but were reassured that night as Faisal rose to his feet and extemporized, delivering a marvellous speech in which he told them warmly that they were of one race with the Arabs. He thanked them for their gifts, a beautifully bound Talmud and a gold facsimile of the Tablets of the Law. Gertrude commented: “I'm immensely happy over the way this thing is going. I feel as if I were in a dream . . . On our guarantee all the solid people are coming in to Faisal and there is a general feeling that we made the right choice in recommending him. If we can bring some kind of order out of chaos, what a thing worth doing it will be!”

And then came the celebrations at Ramadi. If Faisal's coronation, to be held in Baghdad some weeks later, was a formal European ceremony, Ramadi was the Bedouin equivalent, a tribal gathering in his honour, and the culmination of the gains of the Arab fight for independence. For Gertrude, too, it was the culmination of her long fight for the Arabs, the sensational climax of tribal joy and triumph; and an occasion on which she, though not the only Briton present, took the prime place amongst
them as she stood on the dais beside Faisal, Ali Sulaiman, the powerful pro-British Sheikh of the Dulaim, and her great friend Fahad Beg of the Anazeh.

For three weeks, temperatures had been over 115 degrees. Ramadi was seventy miles away, on the Euphrates. Gertrude and her chauffeur had to leave at 4 a.m. Just before the halfway mark, Fallujah, she saw the rising cloud of dust that signalled Faisal's cavalcade just ahead. Drawing level with his car, she asked permission to drive on so that she might photograph his arrival there. A few miles before Fallujah they came to the tents of the Dulaim, and from that point on, the road was lined with tribesmen roaring their salute and waving their rifles above their heads, kicking up a fog of dust like drifting cliffs on either side. As Faisal's car drew ahead of them they wheeled away and galloped on, to form a continuous wild cavalcade alongside the car. Thus they escorted him into Fallujah, where they found every house decorated and the population crowded out into the streets and on the rooftops.

There they stopped for a while, for Faisal to hold court and eat, while the motorcade was taken across the Euphrates by flying bridge. Faisal and a small party, Gertrude included, then stepped into a decorated boat and crossed the river. The far bank rose steeply, and there where the Syrian desert began were ranged the fighting men of the Anazeh, Fahad Beg's tribe, on horse and camel. Faisal stopped his car to salute the huge standard of their tribe. As they drove on north-west, the tribes rode with them, and the Chief Ali Sulaiman came to the outskirts of Ramadi to greet him. On the banks, an extraordinary sight awaited them: before the massed ranks of horse and camel stood a gigantic snow-white camel ridden by a black standard-bearer holding aloft the standard of the Dulaim.

Faisal entered the shadow of the black tent pitched by the Euphrates, two hundred feet square with its sides made of freshly cut branches. Inside, from the entrance to the dais at the far end, the tribesmen stood shoulder to shoulder. Faisal sat on the high divan with Fahad Beg on his right, “a great tribesman amongst famous tribes and a great Sunni among Sunnis . . . I never saw [Faisal] look so splendid. He wore his usual white robes with a fine black abba [tunic] over them, flowing white headdress and silver bound Aqal [rope band].”

Then he began to speak, leaning forward to beckon the men at the back to come nearer. There was a surge as some five hundred men drew
near and sank to the ground before him. He spoke to them as a tribal chief in his strong musical voice.

He spoke in the great tongue of the desert, sonorous, magnificent—no language like it.

“For four years” he said, “I have not found myself in a place like this or in such company.” He told them how Iraq was to rise to their endeavours with himself at their head. He asked them “Arabs, are you at peace with one another?” They shouted back “Yes, we are at peace.”

“From this day—what is the date? And what is the hour?” They answered him. “From this day”—giving the Muhammadan date—“and from this hour any tribesman who lifts his hand against a tribesman is responsible to me. I will judge between you calling your Sheikhs in council. I have my rights over you as your Lord . . . and you have your rights as subjects which it is my business to guard.” His speech rolled on, punctuated with tribal cries of “Yes, by God” and “The truth, by God, the truth!”

Now came the supreme moment of Gertrude's career, the culmination of all her work. Fahad Beg and Ali Sulaiman stood up on either side of Faisal to swear allegiance. But the words they spoke were “We swear allegiance to you because you are acceptable to the British government.” Gertrude wrote:

Faisal was a little surprised. He looked quickly round to me smiling and then he said “No-one can doubt what my relations are to the British, but we must settle our affairs ourselves.” He looked at me again, and I held out my two hands clasped together as a symbol of the union of the Arab and British governments. It was a tremendous moment.

Now Ali Sulaiman brought up his forty or fifty sheikhs, one by one, to lay their hands in Faisal's and swear allegiance. Faisal, followed by Sulaiman and Fahad Beg, emerged into the sunlight. The tribesmen in their thousands circled them, galloping around with wild cries, as they processed to the palace garden where a feast was held. Afterwards, Faisal climbed onto a high dais against a wall hung with carpets. The chiefs and Gertrude sat behind him, and one by one the mayors,
qazis
, and other notables of all the cities of Iraq, from Fallujah to Qaim, rose one
after another from their chairs beneath the trees to place their hands in his. Gertrude took in the beauty of the setting, the variety of dress and colour, the grave faces of the village elders, white-turbaned or draped in the red keffiyeh, and the dignity with which Faisal accepted the homage.

It was only six weeks since his arrival, and the referendum had proved almost unanimous in his favour. He was to be crowned in Baghdad in a fortnight, and he called on the Naqib to help him form his first Cabinet. Gertrude wanted to show Faisal the great archway of Ctesiphon, which he had never seen. She drove out with her servants soon after dawn to prepare the breakfast they would eat in the cool of the day. There they sat on fine carpets, drank coffee, and ate eggs, tongue, sardines, and melons. She wrote home on 6 August:

It was wonderfully interesting showing that splendid place to Faisal. He is an inspiring tourist. After we had re-constructed the palace and seen Khosroes sitting in it, I took him into the high windows to the South, whence we could see the Tigris, and told him the story of the Arab conquest as Tabari records it . . . You can imagine what it was like reciting it to him. I don't know which of us was the more thrilled . . .

Faisal has promised me a regiment of the Arab Army—“the Khatun's Own.” I shall presently ask you to have their colours embroidered . . . Oh Father, isn't it wonderful. I sometimes think I must be in a dream.

The regiment did not come to pass. A charming compliment that gave her much pleasure, it would have been a difficult concept to run past Cox.

Returning straight to the office after the Ctesiphon outing, she worked for four hours, took an hour for lunch, then visited the Naqib. Then, in her role as President of the Baghdad Public Library, she attended a committee meeting. She had determined that the library would contain books in three European languages, as well as in Arabic and five other Oriental languages; and that it would issue a magazine for book reviews and a catalogue of all the manuscripts available there. She paid a courtesy call on the sister-in-law of Sasun Effendi Eskail, and went home to host a dinner for Hamid Khan, a cousin of the Aga Khan. Even for her, it was quite a day. It was unbearably hot, but despite the strong currents and the occasional shark—one had bitten a boy only that week—
she took a swim in the Tigris, and was amused to write home about Cox's latest addition to his menagerie, the largest eagle she had ever seen: “It lives on a perch on the shady side of the house and it eats bats. These bats are netted in the dusk . . . the eagle likes to eat them in the morning, so the long-suffering Lady Cox keeps them in a tin in her ice chest.”

She had never been so busy or so happy. It was a bonus that on the rounds of courtesy calls that she regularly made she would often be accompanied by the King's personal adviser. Tall and clean-shaven, “Ken” Cornwallis was tanned and good-looking, with a beaky nose and piercing blue eyes. A man of aggressive integrity, humorous, he had been Faisal's adviser for five years now, and the Amir had asked him to come with him to Baghdad.

And then there was Faisal, with his charm and his humour, his gratitude, and his interest in her. There was an affection between them: he called her his sister.

One hot evening she was riding by the Euphrates enjoying the cool river air, and passed Faisal's new house, still in the process of being restored and redecorated. She saw his car at the door, and leaving her pony with one of his slaves, climbed up to the roof in her breeches and shirt. There she found him sitting with his ADCs, watching the setting sun reflected in the water, the desert beyond merging with the fading red of the sky. He smiled to see her, invited her with a wave of his hand to join them in their picnic, and, rising, took her hand. Moving to one side, he spoke to her in Arabic, using the familiar “thou”: “ ‘Enti Iraqiyah, enti badasiyak' he said to me, ‘You're a Mesopotamian, a Bedouin.' ”

At the last minute before the coronation was due to take place, there was a “flap”; the Colonial Office sent a cable demanding Faisal announce in his speech that the ultimate authority in the land was the High Commissioner. Faisal said that from the first he had made it clear that he was an independent sovereign in treaty with Britain. To declare Cox the ultimate authority would rekindle the opposition of the extremists. Gertrude agreed with him. That he should increase his independence was what he had been asked to do.

On 23 August 1921, Faisal was crowned in the carpeted courtyard of the Serai in Baghdad, where he was currently occupying the reception rooms. Fifteen hundred guests were seated in blocks: the British, the Arab officials, townsmen, ministers, and local deputations. The ceremony began in the cool of the early morning, at 6 a.m. Faisal, in uniform, with
Sir Percy, in ceremonial white with all his ribbons and stars, and General Sir Aylmer Haldane, the army chief, followed by several ADCs, made their way past the guard of honour, the Dorsets, to the dais. “Faisal looked very dignified but much strung up,” Gertrude noted. “He looked along the front row and caught my eye and I gave him a tiny salute.”

One Sayyid Hussain, representing the elderly Naqib, read out Cox's proclamation, which included the fact that Faisal had been elected King by 96 per cent of the people of Mesopotamia. The cry of “Long Live the King!” rang out, the audience stood, a flag was broken, and the band—for lack as yet of a national anthem—played “God Save the King.” A salute of twenty-one guns followed. Then came hundreds of deputations to greet Faisal:

Basrah and Amarah came on Friday, Hillah and Mosul on Saturday . . . first the Mosul town magnates, my guests and their colleagues, next the Christian Archbishops and Bishops and the Jewish Grand Rabbi . . . The third group was more exciting than all the others; it was the Kurdish chiefs of the frontier who have elected to come into the Iraq state until they see whether an independent Kurdistan develops which will be still better to their liking . . .

The week culminated in an invitation to Gertrude from Faisal to tea, in order to discuss the design of the new national flag and his personal standard, which was to include a gold crown on the red triangle of the Hejaz. His first Cabinet was formed: she had secret reservations about three of the nine members, and rejoiced that it was no longer her decision.

Faisal invited her to the first dinner party in his house on the river. Dressed exquisitely for evening, she floated up the Tigris on his launch. The people of the suburb of Karradah recognized her as she passed, and saluted her, smiling. Her companion Nuri Pasha Said told her that just as Faisal would be remembered in London for his Arab dress, so she would always be remembered: “There's only one Khatun . . . So for a hundred years they'll talk of the Khatun riding by.”

Have I ever told you what the river is like on a hot summer night? At dusk the mist hangs in long white bands over the water; the twilight fades and the lights of the town shine out on either bank, with the river, dark and smooth
and full of mysterious reflections, like a road of triumph through the mist. Silently a boat with a winking headlight slips down the stream, then a company of quffahs, each with his tiny lamp, loaded to the brim with water melons from Samarra . . . And we slow down the launch so that the wash may not disturb them. The waves of our passage don't even extinguish the floating votive candles each burning on its minute boat made out of the swathe of a date cluster, which anxious hands launched above the town—if they reach the last town yet burning, the sick man will recover, the baby will be born safely into this world of hot darkness and glittering lights . . . Now I've brought you out to where the palm trees stand marshalled along the banks. The water is so still that you can see the Scorpion in it, star by star.