Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  We went on boldly through this strange crack in the rocks. Sometimes it opened out into a great hall, sometimes it was so low that we had to creep through it, flat on the sand. And at the end we reached a clear, cold pool, fed by a spring in the rock. We waded into it and filled all our flasks . . . We had left lights at various points on the way to guide us back, yet the place was so strange and gate-of-the-pit-like, that I was not sorry when we saw daylight again.

  The benefits of her brief rest in Baghdad soon evaporated, and her diary gives the picture of a woman so tired that her normal alarm response was barely functioning. She was able to fall asleep on her camel, for the first time, and without falling off. More important, the Syrian desert was no longer as safe as she had counted on. Raids—ghazzus—were taking place all around, and she soon heard of bodies being left in the desert to be eaten by dogs. In her weariness, the ritual tasks of visiting tents and taking on rafiqs began to assume a dreamlike, repetitive quality. She remembered only the unusual things, like her encounter with a baby gazelle in a sheikh’s tent:

  They brought it to me and laid it in my lap, where it fell asleep. It lay curled round like a Mycenaean ivory, with one absurd pointed horn stretched out over its ear; it slept through the talk. And I looking at the sharp watchful faces of the men round the coffee hearth, and remembering my own probably anxious face, thought that there was none in that company wholly free from apprehension but the little gazelle asleep upon my knee. Its small confident presence was encouraging.

  Ten days out of Baghdad she found herself near a huge encampment of Anazeh tribesmen, and resigned herself with reluctance to the delays of another courtesy visit and the taking on of another rafiq. The Anazeh were numerous and widespread enough for her to describe them as a “nation.” The southern Anazeh belonged to Ibn Saud, while the northern were divided into two, one group ruled by Ibn Shlan, the other by Fahad Beg ibn Hadhdbal, whose three hundred tents were presently spread over the grassy ridges of the Garah just ahead of her. He was “such a big man that I fear I shall have to camp with him,” she commented. But when she met him, she warmed to him: “He received me with a kindness almost fatherly and I loved being with him. He spread out beautiful carpets on which we sat, leaning against a camel saddle. His hawk sat on its perch behind us, and his greyhound lay beside it.” It was to be one of the most significant encounters of her life, and of immense value in her later work.

  Fahad Beg, some seventy years old, was a man of vision. He was one of the first great sheikhs of the Bedouin to recognize the value of property. He understood that the coming of the railway would mean the end of breeding camels for transport. He had bought land in the settled area of the Hussainiyah Canal west of Karbala, where he cultivated palms, but for half the year he reverted to his Bedouin wanderings with his camels and his clan, while the obligatory raids were carried on by his eldest son, Mitab. Much later, in the postwar world, it would amuse Gertrude, in recognition of his early appreciation of mechanical transport, to take him for his first flight in a plane.

  She spent that afternoon exploring the ruins of a primitive town an hour away, took copious notes, and returned to a message from Fahad Beg saying that he would like to spend the evening with her. He came to her tent followed by an entourage of men carrying many bowls and cooking pots, and provided what was to Gertrude a true desert luxury: a delicious dinner. In the enjoyment of this, a strong rapport was established between them. “We ate and the dusk fell and the rain came down again, and still we talked, of the state of the Iraq and of the future of Turkey and of our friends in Baghdad, till at 8 o’clock he left me and I went to bed . . . amid a shower of blessings.”

  Struggling on the next day against a furious cold wind, she wondered if this journey would ever end. She had what we would probably identify as repetitive strain injury, a pulled muscle from camel-riding that sent shooting pains from her thigh to her instep. She limped about the camp, and wrote in her other diary that she needed to sleep for a year. She was beginning to lose track of the days—“Yesterday—what happened yesterday? We crossed high plains and wide valleys”—and found the landscape tiresome to map because it had no features. Then, suddenly, out of this wilderness appeared a solitary man, on foot. They rode up to him and tried to communicate in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, but he maintained silence. They gave him a handful of bread, which he accepted, and they rode on. She looked back and watched him, slowly heading for the heart of an uninhabited desert. Later on, she almost wondered whether she had been hallucinating. She was exhausted enough for anything:

  There are people camped in the hills above us and I don’t care what they do to us . . . Here was such a long day’s march ahead of us and my soul shrank from it. I wondered whether I should cry, out of sheer weariness, and what they would think if I dropped tears into the coffee hearth! My reputation as a traveller would never survive these revelations.

  In the way that extreme sleep deprivation liberates the mind from stress, taking the edge off imminent predicaments while promoting a more impressionable state of mind, her daily writings took on a bigger and more spiritual perspective. She jotted down a remembered verse of Shelley’s “Spirit of Delight”:

  I love snow and all the forms

  of the radiant frost;

  I love wind and rain storms, anything almost

  That is Nature’s and may be

  Untouched by man’s misery.

  And her own description of a storm ahead is as poetic a piece of prose as she ever wrote:

  A great storm marched across our path. We, riding in a world darkened by its august presence, watched and heard. The lightning flickered through the cloud masses, the thunder spoke from them and on the outskirts companies of hail, scourged and bent by a wind we could not feel, hurried over the plain and took possession of the mountains.

  Then the clouds cleared, revealing a beautiful golden bay of desert with the towers of the medieval castle at its centre. They were within sight of Palmyra. Three more days of ten- or twelve-hour marches, and they came down from the snows of Mount Hermon to the very place where she had picked up her camels, outside Damascus, and pitched their first camp of the journey. On 1 May she rode through the city’s outlying vineyards and orchards. She had not seen a green landscape for four and a half months, and the rushing water, the new corn, the abundant olives, the rustling of chestnut leaves, the birdsong, and the sun-bleached roses—all blessed her eyes and ears. The first building on the Dumayr road, as she came into Damascus, was the English hospital, where she had a friend, Dr. Mackinnon. She heaved herself off the camel and almost fell through the door. In a few minutes Dr. Mackinnon was beside her, then his wife. They looked at her—and took charge. Later that day she reflected:

  So here I am in a garden which is one bower of roses, and in a quiet house where no one can bother me and I can lie still and rest. But it isn’t much of a success yet, for I go on riding camels through my dreams . . . Now it’s all behind me and I must try to forget it for a little, till I am less weary. I’m still too near it—it looms too big, out of all proportion to the world, and too dark, unbelievably menacing.

  She rested for a few days, then the visitors began to arrive. Among them, in due course, came the Rashid agent whose “crafty narrow face” and “soft slow voice” had filled her with a vague alarm when she had invested her £200 with him in exchange for the letter of credit. He asked her if she had heard the news about Ibrahim. She asked him what he meant. “He looked at me in silence and drew his fingers across his throat.”

  Ibrahim, it has been suggested, died because he had let Gertrude leave Hayyil. In fact, at about the time she had arrived in Baghdad, the young Amir had indeed had his uncle, the Regent Zamil ibn Subhan, murdered at Abu Ghar—in part because Zamil had been in secret communication with Ibn Saud in the hope of reaching a peaceful settlement. The Amir now needed to kill Zamil’s brother Ibrahim, together with all the Subhan kinsmen and their slaves, because, if he had not, they would have been hon
our-bound to kill the Amir and his sons. Thus a fresh blood feud had been initiated. It was not long before the Amir, in his turn, was murdered. And so the Rashids declined, as Gertrude had predicted, moving towards their end in a welter of assassination and intrigue.

  Fitting epilogue though this was to the horrors of Hayyil, it was not of Ibrahim’s death that she found herself thinking when she fell into a reverie, settling the events of the past four months into some kind of perspective. The muezzin call that had haunted her captivity haunted her now, forming in her mind an indelible impression of Arab fatalism and spirituality:

  “God is great, God is great. There is no God but God. And Mohammed is the prophet of God. God is great. God is great.” Low and soft, borne on the scented breeze of the desert, the mighty invocation, which is the Alpha and Omega of Islam, sounds through my memory when I think of Hayyil.

  Ten

  WAR WORK

  The cat and I are the only two not in uniform.

  It was a different Gertrude who returned from Hayyil, and it was to a different world that she returned. She had gone to Rounton to recover, and was there at the outbreak of war, writing heart-sore letters to Dick Doughty-Wylie in Addis Ababa. When war was proclaimed on 4 August 1914, she went out on to the estate, climbing on haystacks and carts to address the labourers, encouraging them to do what she would have done if she had been a man—to join up. She went to talk to the workers in the iron ore mines, and bumped through the fields in a car, exhorting the men to go and fight.

  The war was expected to last four months, not four years. Since the ravages of Napoleon’s total war, Europe had forged treaties binding nation to nation in a grid of obligation. Britain would come to the aid of France, France would intervene for Russia, Germany for Austria, Russia for Serbia, Poland, and Italy; Turkey would march with Germany.

  Germany had in Kaiser Wilhelm an arrogant aggressor of the military class, busy building surplus battleships for his navy and promoting the power of his army. But the danger came from the most unlikely quarter, the tired old empire of Austria-Hungary. The Emperor deplored change, and ruled with a firm hand as his divided subjects worked for self-determination. The Serbians, particularly, resented their subservience, and militant groups were unwilling to wait for the promised reforms of the Emperor’s well-intentioned heir, Archduke Ferdinand. As Ferdinand toured Sarajevo in his open carriage on a pleasant summer’s day, a shot rang out from the crowd and the Archduke fell dead.

  As the dominoes had been stacked, so they fell. Austria marched into Serbia. Russia mobilized in support of Serbia, made threats against Turkey, and called in France. Observing the powers of Europe lining up against her, Germany decided on a pre-emptive strike. To the dismay of the French, the Germans tore through Belgium and in a few weeks were camped within reach of Paris. Britain felt honour-bound to declare war, and sent an expeditionary force of a hundred thousand men to the aid of France. This joint force took the full impact of the onslaught in the north, while two million Frenchmen formed a human barrier as far as Switzerland. Meanwhile, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and the African colonies came to the aid of Britain. Soon Japan had invaded China. Country by country, most of the world had slipped into war. That single shot in a remote European capital precipitated the mobilization of 65 million men and would cause 38 million casualties.

  Before the end of 1914, Britain’s Intelligence Bureau in Cairo was already asking questions about the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Russia was facing war on two fronts and asking for Britain’s support in the Mediterranean. Britain, contemplating a new strategy, was ready to give it. After only three months, the fighting in the trenches of northern France had reached stalemate, with no end in sight. If Britain initiated a south-eastern front in the Dardanelles, they hoped Germany would divide its forces and go to the defence of the Turks. The question was this: If there was to be a south-eastern front, if Turkey joined Germany in allout war against Great Britain, whose side would the Arabs take? Wyndham Deedes in Cairo asked the War Office if they could get hold of Gertrude Bell, the well-known traveller who had so recently covered the ground, and ask for her views.

  Gertrude, at Rounton, took the letter from the breakfast table straight into her study, cleared her desk in her time-honoured way by sweeping all the books and papers onto the floor, and sat down to write. The report that she produced, in response to the War Office’s request, showed her sensitive grasp of a complicated political situation. The gist was this: Syria was pro-British, with a dislike of the growing French influence in the region. In the circumstances, Syria would be perfectly content to come under British jurisdiction:

  On the Baghdad side we weigh much more heavily in the scale than Germany because of the importance of Indian relations—trade, chiefly. The presence of a large body of German engineers in Baghdad, for railway building, will be of no advantage to Germany, for they are not popular. On the whole I should say that Iraq would not willingly see Turkey at war with us and would not take an active part in it. But out there, the Turks would probably turn . . . to Arab chiefs who have received our protection. Such action would be extremely unpopular with the Arab Unionists who look on Sayid Talib of Basra, Kuwait, and Ibn Saud, as powerful protagonists. Sayid Talib is a rogue, he has had no help from us, but our people (merchants) have maintained excellent terms with him . . .

  The import of her report was fully corroborated for the War Office by their inspectors on the ground, who knew their own Arab vilayets,* although they could not see the bigger picture that Gertrude could so easily supply after her epic journey to Hayyil. For the first time, Whitehall was recognizing her formidable knowledge and making use of it. From now on, her future was to be bound up with the British government.

  The “Bell Report” was swiftly passed to Cairo and also to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. Grey was already, like so many of the Liberal statesmen and politicians of the day, well known to the Bells. Hugh had sat with him on the board of the London and North Eastern Railway, and Grey’s gentle treatise on fly-fishing was one of the books Gertrude had taken with her to the desert in 1911 to remind her of the temperate English countryside—she had told him so on her return from Hayyil, when Grey had been one of the first visitors to Sloane Street.

  Life everywhere was changing, for some less than for others. The magazines were full of photographs of society beauties in uniform: Countess Bathurst in her Red Cross outfit, the Marchioness of Londonderry in the uniform of the Women’s Service Legion. The new British Vogue, of which Gertrude would later become an occasional reader, showed the Duchess of Wellington knitting a sock for a soldier. Mrs. Vincent Astor, photographed in a fetching garden hat, was quoted as wishing to open a convalescent home near Paris. Lady Randolph Churchill had “organized some very beautiful tableaux vivants.” Gertrude, who was well aware of the silliness of this, longed to find work commensurate with her abilities. “I have asked some of my friends at the Red X to join me in the first suitable job abroad that falls vacant,” she wrote to a friend, “. . . and I have written to friends in Paris asking whether I could be of use to them in any way . . . Arabia can wait.”

  For the moment, all she could do was to join the influx of well-born ladies into the workplace, and take a genteel clerking job in a hospital at Lord Onslow’s at Clandon Park in Surrey, one of the many grand houses now occupied by the wounded. There were a hundred Belgian soldiers in the wards there but, to her bitter disappointment, she was restricted to the routine paperwork and not allowed to do any nursing. She complained to Florence that she had not got nearly enough to do. Sundays were particularly boring. On one, she went for a walk and stopped for tea with some Surrey friends, the John St. Loe Stracheys, who had also filled the bedrooms of their large house with convalescents. At Rounton, Florence was making ready to do the same. She told Gertrude that there would be twenty at first, more later, and Gertrude wondered how they could all be fitted in. She told Florence about one of the Stracheys’ first inmates, a Congol
ese soldier who was parted with difficulty from a large knife he insisted on keeping beside him in bed: he explained that in his part of Africa, prisoners were killed and eaten. “St. Loe remarked ‘It is a curiously unexpected result of the war to have one’s best bedroom occupied by a cannibal.’ ”

  It was after only three weeks at Clandon, on 21 November, that she was asked to go at once to Boulogne, to work in the new Red Cross Office for the Wounded and Missing.

  The Wounded and Missing Enquiry Department had opened in Paris at the outbreak of war, to help answer the questions of families whose men had gone to war and whose letters had ceased. These families had no idea whether their men were wounded, missing, or dead. News reached them only by means of the so-called “fear telegram” whereby the War Office let them know the man had been killed, or by finding his name among the casualties list published in The Times. The War Office being unable to cope with the flood of enquiries, the families’ only recourse was to write to the Red Cross for information. The task of the W&MED was to try to trace three categories of men: those who were dead but not yet known to be dead, the men wounded so seriously that they were in hospital and not well enough to write home, and those who had been taken prisoner. At first it concerned itself with only the higher ranks. Not until December was a satellite Enquiry Office opened to deal with letters from the families of non-commissioned officers and men, who were harder to trace.