Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  *

  On the first evening, T. E. Lawrence joined the party at the Semiramis Hotel. Three days after taking over the Colonial Office, Churchill had drafted an outline of his proposed agenda for Cairo, and on the eve of his departure he approved the collective view of his officials in the Middle East Department about the decisions to be ratified. It would now be a matter of sorting out the details and making sure that the major actors were on board. Lawrence would later joke that the Cairo decisions had really been decided in the Ship Inn, a well-known watering hole frequented by Whitehall civil servants. The quip contained considerable truth. King Faisal had already secretly travelled to London and agreed in principle to become ruler of Mesopotamia, a solution Churchill instantly saw as offering a rapid solution to the problem – provided that Sir Percy Cox, the Baghdad-based High Commissioner, could stage-manage affairs so that Faisal appeared as the genuine choice of the local population. The influence of Lawrence on Churchill was palpable. His view of the scholar-soldier came close to hero worship.10

  The next morning Churchill and Sinclair drove out to the Royal Air Force base at Heliopolis, in the Cairo suburbs. Clementine accompanied them and inspected the married quarters, reviewed them with a critical eye, and listened to guarded complaints by some of the occupants. Greeted by a Guard of Honour, and with a strong wind whipping sand into his eyes, Churchill carefully inspected heavy bombers of No. 70 Squadron. At his side was Sir Hugh Trenchard, who had travelled out with him from London. Churchill’s cost-cutting plan for Mesopotamia depended crucially on the air force taking over desert policing from the army, and he was relying on the Chief of the Air Staff to get the job done against strong opposition, especially from Cox. He was also eager to see an air route opened between Cairo and Baghdad; later that day Trenchard was able to confirm that all the machinery was now in place to complete the route for both automobiles and aircraft. That night, Churchill dined in the mess at Heliopolis with Archie and a few months later the squadron duly moved to Iraq in accord with his grand plan.11

  *

  The Cairo Conference officially opened at the Semiramis Hotel on Saturday 12 March. As it was Churchill’s show it was choreographed to his habits. This meant a late morning start after a leisurely breakfast, with every afternoon devoted to visiting a range of historic sites armed with his easel and paints. He had arrived fully equipped for his battles with the canvas and brought all the colours he needed to capture the yellow desert, purple rocks, and crimson sunsets. The official biography gives the impression that most of the time in Cairo was passed in conference. But Churchill’s passion for painting meant that he built a lengthy afternoon excursion with his paints into every day of the proceedings. Meanwhile, escorted by Captain Coote, Clementine busied herself exploring the bazaars and other sites in and around the capital.

  Churchill organized the conference with the same brisk efficiency he brought to his painting. Two committees were created, one to deal with political matters, the other with military issues. He personally chaired the former and General Congreve, the GOC Egypt and Palestine, the latter; occasionally they met jointly. From the start, he dominated the proceedings and came straight to the point by emphasizing the urgent need to co-ordinate all aspects of British policy in the region, and above all to control expenditure, the nub of the matter. As if to emphasize the point, the Director of Finance at the War Office had also journeyed from London to sit alongside the generals and diplomats around the table. This obsession with expense quickly made itself felt. General Haldane, the commander of British forces in Mesopotamia, promised that all outlying army detachments would be withdrawn to concentrate defence on the Mosul–Baghdad–Basra axis of the country and described the procedures that had been ordered for units leaving the country and the fate of the equipment they were leaving behind. Immediately, Churchill demanded to know what was being done about their animals – horses and mules – and how many of them there were. The number ran into thousands. He then asked if fodder would have to be brought in for them after the start of the approaching financial year, which began on 1 April. The answer to this was that, yes, a lot would have to be brought in. His response was abrupt and shocking. ‘Have them all shot before the commencement of the financial year,’ he ordered.

  There followed a moment of deathly silence. Eventually one of the generals rose to his feet. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘in the name of all humanity I must protest against such ruthless cruelty to poor defenceless animals, which have served us well.’ Another long silence followed. This time it was broken by General Sir Edmund Ironside, the commander of British forces in North Persia. Standing at six feet four inches, the solidly built forty-year-old – inevitably nicknamed ‘Tiny’ – was an impressive figure never afraid of speaking his mind. Patiently, he explained that there were strict War Office rules on how to dispose of surplus animals and that these were being scrupulously followed. There were thousands of animals to be dealt with, but only a handful of army vets available. Standing orders were not to sell off any animals, fit or unfit, in the Middle East, where they would be cruelly treated. Every single animal had to be inspected by a vet and only those with no more than another two years’ service were to be destroyed at once. The remainder were to be shipped off to other places in the British Empire.

  Churchill knew full well about war horses and their fate. As Secretary of State for War, just two years before he had stepped in to save thousands of horses which had served Allied forces on the Western Front. Shipping problems and official bungling had caused lengthy delays in rescuing them from France and Belgium, where they were at serious risk of disease or slaughter at the hands of local butchers. Only his very forceful intervention had speeded up their repatriation. But his brusque intervention now was typical of his operational style: the impetuous response that flew to the heart of the issue – in this case expenditure – countered by the informed view of an expert that forced a re-think. Ironside had Churchill’s respect. They had known each other since the Boer War. Only two years before, Ironside had been commander of the British forces at Archangel that Churchill was hoping to help topple the Bolsheviks. He was not a man to be challenged on such an issue. So Churchill let the matter drop. Nor did he hold a grudge. A couple of days later, over a friendly cup of tea in the hotel, he offered Ironside command over the remaining troops in Mesopotamia after Haldane stepped down later in the year.12 As for the horses, they were disposed of according to War Office rules, as he later explained himself to the House of Commons. Between April and August there was wholesale destruction of some 30,000 animals that could neither be fed nor transported elsewhere and that would not be guaranteed humane treatment if left to the local population.13

  On the political front Sir Percy Cox dutifully followed the conference script by declaring that Faisal would undoubtedly be chosen as King by the Mesopotamians themselves. Predictably, Lawrence also backed Faisal. He explained that this was not just because he was his friend but because the country was ‘backward and half-civilized’, with a number of rival candidates for the throne that meant it needed an active and inspiring candidate to pull it all together. Faisal’s brother Abdullah, reputed to be something of a sybarite with a taste for European opera, was unsuited for the task.

  Churchill endorsed Lawrence’s view. But he had a broader perspective. The British government was already heavily subsidizing Faisal’s father Hussein in Mecca. Abdullah was also emerging as a possible candidate for Transjordan and would require financial support. By backing all three for the vacant thrones, he pointed out, each would know that the position of his brothers depended on his own good behaviour. Thus Britain’s dominance in the region would be assured. This revealed a truly Churchillian streak of Realpolitik. It also reflected much of Lawrence’s thinking. Historians now refer to it as ‘the Sharifian solution’ – a mosaic of client states ruled by the Hashemite family and watched over by Britain.

  The morning’s business done, after lunch Churchill departed by car with Clementine a
nd Archie to view the pyramids, and that evening threw a large dinner party at the Semiramis for the major players. Maxwell Coote was a wide-eyed observer of the spectacle. Some wag, he noted, had tagged the participants ‘The Forty Thieves’, which tickled Churchill enormously. But the young officer’s eye was mostly drawn to the solitary woman amongst them. Her name was Gertrude Bell.

  *

  Sometime during the conference a photographer snapped a black-and-white picture of the fifty-two-year-old Bell sitting behind a be-suited Lawrence in the desert squinting at the camera under the bright Egyptian sun. She is dressed in an unfashionably long skirt and broad-brimmed hat. Neither is smiling, and the photographer has titled his work ‘The True Monarchs of Mesopotamia’. In the flesh, Bell had greenish eyes and light auburn hair, and was rarely seen without a cigarette in her hand. Brilliant and opinionated, she has been dubbed by contemporary observers as ‘Queen of the Desert’ (or ‘Desert Queen’), as well as ‘Maker of Nations’, for her contribution to the conference.14

  Like Lawrence, she was a trained archaeologist and expert on the Middle East with a degree from Oxford – and in her case also the record of being the first woman to receive a First Class degree in Modern History. She had climbed Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, and before the war had led two expeditions to Mesopotamia. On her chosen stage of the Orient she was the only female star. She had worked for the wartime Arab Bureau and arrived in Baghdad in 1917 as an intelligence officer. Since then she had settled in the city and become a close and trusted advisor to the tall and taciturn Sir Percy Cox. Few Europeans knew more about the country than her, and locals called her ‘Al-Khatun’ (the Lady). She spoke Arabic, it was said, like a nightingale. She and Lawrence knew each other well as professional colleagues and both had taken part in the Paris Peace Conference, where she was impressed by the ‘charm, simplicity, and sincerity’ of the emerging hero of the Arabian desert.15

  ‘Gerty’ – as she was privately called by Lawrence – arrived in Cairo by train on the eve of the conference, and he escorted her to the Semiramis Hotel. Here, closeted in her room, they spent an hour discussing business before she left to introduce herself to Clementine. Meanwhile Cox, who had journeyed with her from Baghdad, disappeared to have a long discussion with Churchill. She arrived in Cairo with a highly negative view of the Colonial Secretary. Some of it stemmed from her family background. Her baronet grandfather was a wealthy Newcastle ironmaster and Liberal Member of Parliament while her father, who ran the family steelworks in Middlesbrough, had been High Sheriff of Durham and Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire. For such traditional Liberals, the maverick Tory Radical Randolph Churchill’s renegade son, who had turned against Asquith to join forces with the firebrand Lloyd George, was undoubtedly an anathema. It may have counted, too, that the great but unconsummated love of Bell’s life, a British Army officer, had been killed at Gallipoli.

  A personal encounter with one of the Churchill tribe can only have fuelled her disdain. In January, Clare Sheridan’s brother Hugh Frewen, who had survived six months’ fighting at Gallipoli, arrived in Baghdad, sent by the army to compile a gazetteer of Mesopotamia. He was also in the midst of divorcing his first wife, the daughter of an Italian duke. Bell was infuriated by what she considered his incompetence and laziness as he presented her with a series of written questions that she dismissed as ‘either pure tosh or . . . things that you can’t know’. Finally, she lost patience and suggested sharply that before he bothered her again he might consult a few articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Then, in her own words, she ‘bowed him out rather abruptly’.

  To Bell, Frewen’s very presence in Baghdad exemplified the British military’s extravagance and wastefulness, which to her was ultimately the fault of the War Office of which Churchill was then the minister. That same month, when she heard that he would be taking charge of the Middle East and had already crossed swords with Cox over the future of the country and the pace and level of troop withdrawals, she erupted in fury. ‘With a man like Winston in command there is no further talk of honour,’ she complained bitterly, ‘if we retain the mandate we must spend the money on which it depends.’ Cox, she went on, would make this clear. But would ‘rogues like Winston and Lloyd George’ be honest about this to the British public? To her, there was no doubt. They would go on with their ‘hanky-panky’ until it led to terrible disaster in Mesopotamia. It was with considerable forebodings, therefore, that she arrived in Cairo.16

  Yet she need not have worried. The second day’s proceedings saw the choice of Faisal as King in Mesopotamia ratified and plans for troop reductions agreed. Before leaving London, Churchill had promised Lloyd George that he would save him millions of pounds, and he successfully pressed the military chiefs at the conference table for even larger and faster cuts than they proposed. Satisfied by his victory, after lunch he drove out to the pyramids to paint and only returned after dark. Meanwhile, Bell went shopping with Clementine and returned to the hotel laden with red and green slippers they had purchased in a local bazaar. Amongst her many other attributes, Bell was noted for a preoccupation with clothes and had her hats and dresses sent from London and Paris.17

  But that night it was neither Gertie nor Clementine who filled Churchill’s thoughts. It was Archie Sinclair. During the day the temperature of his wartime second-in-command had shot up to an alarming 105 degrees and a nurse from the Anglo-American Hospital was urgently summoned. It was a case of typhoid fever, probably from drinking cont-aminated water. When Maxwell Coote broke the news, Churchill was seriously upset and feared the worst. ‘Winston . . . is evidently a bit of a pessimist where illness is concerned and was apt to be very anxious,’ noted his aide-de-camp. That night, he and a brooding Churchill dined alone together, and in spite of the champagne ordered by the latter it was a largely silent affair until they discovered that each was familiar with the same stretch of the wartime frontline in France. After that, there was no lack of topics for conversation and the meal ended with a now relaxed and amiable Churchill asking Coote to take over as much of Archie’s work as he could until his old friend recovered. Soon, Coote was taking down dictation for telegrams that Churchill was regularly dispatching to keep Lloyd George informed of progress. Without the Welsh Wizard’s full backing, he would be a politician adrift.18

  The third day followed the same pattern. Churchill relentlessly insisted that more should be done to reduce expenditures and then, after lunch, disappeared again to paint. Coote was impressed by the results. ‘Another really most clever picture of Cairo and the hills looking back from the Pyramids,’ he noted. Clementine returned from yet another shopping expedition with her own trophies of perfume and cigarettes, although, with her usual prudence, she refrained from buying a carpet that caught her eye because she felt it was too expensive. Old habits died hard, and she hadn’t yet fully absorbed their new-found wealth.19

  *

  Gertrude Bell was feeling better about things each day. It had been a relief to find on arrival that the briefing papers provided for her coincided with her own ideas. She also proved a strong ally in the grand plan by Churchill and Trenchard to gradually hand over the main responsibility for security across the Middle East to the Royal Air Force – a task that could be covered at a fraction of the cost of maintaining large numbers of troops on the ground. Trenchard was something of an odd man out amongst the army generals and civilian pro-consuls at Cairo. As an oddity herself amongst a gathering of men, Bell took a liking to him. She noticed how he emphasized his words with a stab of his pencil each time he answered one of the many hostile critics opposed to the Royal Air Force – a new and untested force whose longer-term future still hung in the balance. One day, leaving the conference room, she innocently asked him: ‘How many pencils do you get through in a conference, Air Marshal?’ This broke the ice between them and she became convinced that provided the air weapon was used with restraint it would work as an effective force.20

  Bell’s satisfaction with the
results also extended to even the contentious and potentially divisive issue of Kurdistan. Churchill arrived in Cairo open to the idea of giving the Kurds their own separate state. This would provide a buffer between Turkey and Mesopotamia and mean not placing them under an Arab ruler, who might oppress them. But in the course of the fourth day’s discussions he conceded to the strongly held opinion of both Bell and Cox, who favoured a united Mesopotamia with Kurdistan inside its borders.21 Having also squeezed yet more expenditure cuts out of the military, that evening he sent a telegram to Lloyd George telling him that everyone was on board. Relieved also to learn that Archie Sinclair’s temperature was finally back to normal, he took off riding in the afternoon and returned again only after dark. This time he brought back a painting of the pyramids themselves. The admiring Coote thought it was the best he had yet done.22

  The young air officer was being kept busy. The next day Winston and Clementine explored the great Mohamed Ali Mosque atop the Cairo Citadel, visited the local hospital, and walked around the legendary ‘City of the Dead’, the sprawling Muslim necropolis inhabited by thousands of Cairo’s poor and dispossessed. It was located on the edge of the Mokatta Hills, and that afternoon Churchill set up his easel there and painted. Again, he had good reason to feel pleased with the morning’s progress. Trenchard’s scheme for the air control of Mesopotamia was approved and Churchill had sketched out his own views on the importance of air power for the future of the Empire. An air route from Cairo to Karachi, for example, would shorten the journey from England to Australia by eight or ten days. His imperial gaze also encompassed Arabia. Here the tribal chieftain Ibn Saud was a rival to Hussein in Mecca. Already, Britain was subsidizing him to the tune of £60,000 a year. Sir Percy Cox wanted to double the amount and Bell agreed on the grounds that it would keep the Saudi ruler happy as compensation for seeing Faisal and Abdullah receive kingdoms from Britain. In the end it was agreed that Hussein and Ibn Saud should each be given an annual subsidy of £100,000 to keep them in line with British objectives. That evening Churchill and Clementine were the guests at a ball given by General Allenby. One of those present was Bekir Sami Bey, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Churchill seized the chance to extract a promise that Turkey would not interfere with Britain’s interests in Mosul in northern Mesopotamia.23