Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  Now, the most exciting and rewarding part of her life was about to begin.

  *The Turkish word for an administrative region.

  Eleven

  CAIRO, DELHI, BASRA

  In the 1910s the Middle East was rife with intelligence-gathering and crypto-diplomacy. Before 1908, when Britain became suspicious of Germany’s ambitions in the area, there had been no international secret service bureau in London. The Foreign Office routinely used unpaid amateurs and adventurers to report on their expeditions. There were few such in the Middle East, where the hazards of travel demanded linguistic ability and a knowledge of desert etiquette, where much of the wilderness was unmapped and where there were no roads and no recourse if things went wrong. Gertrude was skilled in surveillance and drawn to the political flashpoints. Her travels had made her an obvious choice as one of these volunteer informers. She had been in the employment, though unpaid, of the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, and it was in November 1915 that the director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Hall, sent for her in London and told her that Cairo had cabled for her.

  Gertrude’s first-hand knowledge of the vast reaches of Arabia and its diverse peoples made her unique, not only because that knowledge was encyclopaedic, but because her information was so recent. She had returned from Hayyil only sixteen months earlier. In all, she had spent nearly two years of her life travelling in the Arabian deserts. On her seven expeditions she had observed the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire, first as a wealthy tourist and then as explorer, archaeologist, and information-gatherer for the British government.

  Some of her reports had been solicited, some volunteered. At first they had been sent perhaps via Chirol, then directly by herself to the interested statesmen and diplomats that she knew. It was probably the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey who was responsible for her initial employment. The Foreign Office had asked her to investigate how far German influence had penetrated the Turkish Empire in northern and eastern Arabia, and she had found the answers via the many ways open to a woman who would not be suspected of espionage. On the road she had sipped coffee and exchanged gossip in the tent of every sheikh she came across. She had dressed up and dined out in towns and cities, and she had made it her business to use her many contacts to meet and talk to everyone who counted socially or politically. She had photographed many archaeological sites and noted military installations. Where entry was complicated, as in March 1900 at the crusader castle at Kerak, where German officers were retraining Turkish soldiers, she had used all her natural effrontery and simply walked right in—“in an affable way, greet[ing] all the soldiers politely.” Her ever-growing directory of contacts, her skill in direction-finding and cartography, and the meticulous methodology of her records now brought her an official title.

  Major Miss Bell arrived in Cairo, the first woman officer in the history of British military intelligence. Her rank of Major was a courtesy, but she was immediately accounted a General Staff Officer 2nd Grade in the official pecking order. Had the WRENS existed then, she would have worn their white and navy uniform, with white pips for political service. As it was, she wore blue and white striped cotton dresses with flowers at the waist and large straw hats, which she would park alongside the peaked caps and pith helmets on the office coat-stand; in the evenings, she would change into flowing silk gowns with small cardigan jackets to match. “The military people here are much put about how she is to be treated and to how much she is to be admitted,” Hogarth, now a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Cairo, had written to his wife just before Gertrude’s arrival. “I have told them but she’ll settle that and they needn’t worry!” Gertrude wrote home on 3 January 1916: “I’m getting to feel quite at home as a Staff Officer! It is comic isn’t it.”

  Sir Gilbert Clayton had been head of military intelligence for the Egyptian army until transferring to work for Sir Henry McMahon, the new High Commissioner and effectively the ruler of Egypt. Lieutenant-Commander Hogarth had exchanged his archaeologist’s bow-ties and rumpled linen jackets for a starchy white naval uniform and joined Clayton to form the Arab Bureau, the new intelligence organization for Arab affairs. To the staff members—typically fifteen—of the Bureau, Hogarth was the mentor and referee who monitored the vociferous debates and arguments, Clayton the calm centre, quietly working his powerful influence. Its effect, said T. E. Lawrence, was like oil “creeping silently and insistently through everything.”

  The Bureau staff were palmily housed in Cairo’s Grand Continental Hotel, their offices next door in the even grander Savoy. Fans whirled in the ceiling, bells rang, and servants in floor-length robes brought trays of coffee and peppermint tea. Hogarth and Major Lawrence, his own uniform well creased and stained with oil from his Triumph motor-bike, had already lined the walls with reference books on all subjects pertaining to the Middle East. Despite the verandas with their wicker chairs and the palm gardens baking in the midday sun, the atmosphere, permeated with pipe smoke, suggested panelled rooms in Oxford rather than North African tourist luxury. For Gertrude, after her bereavement and her withdrawal from social life, it was almost too convivial. An afternoon spent with Lady Anne Blunt was “an oasis of peace and quiet after the noise and crowd of Cairo. How I hate hotels and the perpetual living in public which they imply! One loathes it more than ever after months of a hermit’s existence.”

  Cairo was the secure heart of the British protectorate that was Egypt, the centre of control. Nominally, the Khedive, or King, still answered to the Turks, but when he ran into bankruptcy in 1875 the British had bailed him out and demanded a Residency in return. Britain then infiltrated the administration much as the Turks had done throughout the Middle East.

  Gertrude’s letters home from Cairo were shorter and less vivid than formerly. She did not describe the clever men by whom she was now surrounded. It was, after all, a secret office. From the military point of view, it was an elitist and possibly subversive entity whose staff were extraordinarily free to pursue their own agendas. The far-reaching international schemes under discussion and the covert aura of their deliberations gave rise to much suspicion, emanating from intelligence staff in India and communicated to London by the Viceroy himself.

  After the initial shock of her arrival, Gertrude was quickly drawn into a new and fascinating world. In the office and over dinner she got to know the big personalities of this circle of which she was now a member. “Gertrude,” as Hogarth remarked before a short trip to London, “is beginning to pervade the place.” She had much in common with the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who had stood in for Hogarth as director of operations at Carchemish, which was being excavated in 1911 when she met Lawrence for the first time. Woolley was now the head of intelligence in Port Said, and the man who had first welcomed her to Egypt. He sat in his office writing, according to Lawrence, “windy concealers of truth for the press.”

  Sir Mark Sykes swept through during that first year. A bombastic Catholic landowner and a near-neighbour of the Bells in Yorkshire, Sykes was an excitable, opinionated traveller who had published books on his expeditions in the Middle East. Gertrude had met him in Haifa in 1905 but the two had quarrelled at a dinner, when he called the Arabs “animals” and described them as “cowardly,” “diseased,” and “idle.” At the time, both she and Sykes had been intent on visiting the Jebel Druze, and later he was to accuse her of tricking him in order to get there first. He wrote to his wife, Edith: “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!” His anger was probably justified. Gertrude did get there first, and she may well have used some trick to delay him. It is alleged that, to ensure that Sykes would be refused permission to travel in the desert, she let slip a lie to the vali in Damascus, telling him that Sykes was “brother-in-law to the Prime Minister of Egypt.” Somehow they had managed to patch up their always spiky relationship; Gertrude wrote to Florence, “I have seen a good deal of him.” Now th
e principal adviser to the British government on its wartime relations with the Arabs, his baggage of prejudices was bound to tarnish their image and damage their fortunes and prospects wherever he meddled.

  The restless George Lloyd, of the banking family, also passed through. He was a cool customer, an expert in finance, politics, and trade and a firm believer in the merits of British imperialism. He did not stay long in Cairo. The myopic and bohemian Aubrey Herbert had crossed Sinai in 1907. His perfect Turkish was a useful Bureau tool. And then there was the Oriental Secretary Sir Ronald Storrs, who had served in turn Sir Eldon Gorst and Kitchener, Residents before McMahon. Storrs was the most entertaining of the sparkling Arab Bureau circle—quick, quizzical, and erudite. He was to Lawrence the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, “the great man among us,” an incomparable linguist and one who could reduce people of any nationality and class to helpless laughter in a matter of minutes. He was also a connoisseur and a fastidious collector of Oriental antiques.

  T. E. Lawrence was a law unto himself, seldom to be found and a constant aggravation to the military. Scruffy, brilliant, self-absorbed, he was both welcoming and challenging, just as he had been when Gertrude had met him, and liked him, at Carchemish. His habit of grinning to himself, as if at some private joke, was still disconcerting—but Gertrude, or “Gerty” as he called her, was seldom disconcerted. His own lengthy wanderings had concentrated on the Crusader castles of Syria and northern Mesopotamia. He had a habit, out of the office, of wearing embroidered waistcoats and cloaks, or Arab dress, but his Arabic was by no means as good as hers. Lacking her wealth, and therefore her status among the sheikhs in the desert, he had not yet been accepted by them as an equal. He had been at the Bureau for months, assembling his “scraps of information,” and took a cavalier attitude to map-making. As he admitted in a letter concerning his map of Sinai roads and wells, “Some of it was accurate, and the rest I invented.” One day, he feared, nemesis would be awaiting him: he would be told to find his way about that desert country with nothing but a copy of his own map.

  Such were the individuals with whom Gertrude was now working. At her first dinner there, with Hogarth and Lawrence, she familiarized herself with the question that was currently dividing loyalties amongst the British staff in Cairo: Could an Arab revolt, perhaps supported by Britain, do to the Turks what three hundred thousand troops had failed to do in the Dardanelles? Both the military and the old-fashioned colonialists were adamant that all that could conceivably be done was being done. In their view, the warrior tribes—dignified in the officers’ mess by the all-encompassing title “the Frocks”—were incapable of disciplined modern warfare. To this argument the Bureau would have retorted that disciplined modern warfare had failed on three fronts already.

  Nineteen fourteen was the year in which the first definite indication of an Arab revolt had surfaced, initially emanating from the shrewd Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, the holiest city of the Hejaz—the region that stretches the length of the Red Sea, on its eastern bank. The title of “Sharif” implied a descendant of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima. The current Sharif, the seventy-year-old Hussain, had been held an “honourable” prisoner in Constantinople for eighteen years, until the overthrow of the old Sultan’s bureaucracy in 1908, after which the new government known as the Young Turks unwisely sent him back to Mecca as Amir, the most senior of all sharifs. Two of his sons, the well-educated and experienced Abdullah and Faisal, stayed on in Constantinople, keeping him politically informed until 1914, when they broke with the Turks and headed for Mecca. The outbreak of war had isolated the Hejaz. The pilgrimages ceased, and the supply of food to this arid region depended at present on the goodwill of the Turks and their all-important railway. In the event of a revolt, British food ships would play a vital role.

  On the eve of the world war Abdullah, as his father’s envoy, had paid a surprise visit to the Oriental Secretary. Sir Ronald Storrs was then acting for the Consul-General in Cairo. The Machiavellian Abdullah, lover of pre-Islamic poetry and player of jocular games, fell to telling ancient tales and reciting the Seven Odes and Laments. Raptly listening, Storrs was moved and impressed by the profundity and the quantity of poetry that Abdullah had committed to memory; so impressed, indeed, that he thought he must have been making a mistake when he was jarred out of his reverie by the discordant word “machine-guns.” Abdullah, reaching the point of his visit at last, wanted to know whether the British would supply the guns as “defence” against attack from the Turks, should his father defy them.

  The issue was taken up by the then British Resident, Lord Kitchener. With the entry into the war of Ottoman Turkey in prospect, he began a correspondence with Abdullah which, once Kitchener had returned to London as Secretary of State for War, would be continued by his successor McMahon. Kitchener asked whether Abdullah “and his father and the Arabs of the Hijaz would be with us or against us.” In a subsequent cable he promised British protection in return for the assistance of “the Arab nation.” He also hinted: “It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Khalifate at Mecca or Medina,” and went on to talk of “the good tidings of the freedom of the Arabs and the rising of the sun over Arabia.”

  Kitchener’s hints were succeeded by McMahon’s equally shrewd obfuscations. Carried in elaborate secrecy to the Amir Hussain, in the hilts of daggers and the soles of shoes, the letters continued to explore the likelihood and ramifications of an Arab revolt against the Turks. Nothing definite had been promised, but, nevertheless, Hussain had seized on the idea that he might become the ruler of the Arab nation.

  “The Arab Question,” as it was called, affected Gertrude particularly in that her initial job was to master the intricacies of Arab politics and personalities in the Hejaz, from Jerusalem as far south as Mecca, where it was hoped the revolt might be initiated. She was to collect together all her tribal information and fill in any gaps, identifying the tribes and their affiliations and enmities, which she would always enliven with entertaining character sketches of the many sheikhs she knew. At the same time she would map the desert tracks, passable ways through the mountains and waterless expanses, transportation facilities, and natural resources, together with the positions and influences of racial and religious groupings and minorities. “My tribe stuff is beginning to be pulled into shape . . . I love doing it . . . I can scarcely tear myself away from it,” she wrote.

  The second part of Gertrude’s work centred on Mesopotamia, which had become of prime importance as the war commenced. Since the earliest civilization this region, set between its natural boundaries of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, provided a fertile easterly frame to Arabia’s northern deserts and gave a passable route to the Indian Ocean through the waters of the Persian Gulf in the south-east. The Mesopotamian Campaign, begun in 1914, had stemmed from the 1911 decision of the First Sea Lord, Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher, with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill, to give more speed to the British navy by converting its ships from coal to oil. It became a priority to ensure a reliable British-owned source of crude.

  The two largest suppliers of oil until 1908 had been America and Russia, but the yield in Azerbaijan had begun to fall, and was by no means under British control. In that year, Burmah Oil struck lucky in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, on the borders of Mesopotamia and Persia. The company would supply fuel oil to the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), piping it the 138 miles down to Abadan, to a new refinery on the east bank of the Shatt al Arab, the great waterway at the southern end of Mesopotamia that carries the Tigris and Euphrates into the Persian Gulf. The British government provided £2.2 million and took a 51 per cent share in APOC, together with a twenty-year contract for the supply of the navy.

  Now there were crucial reasons that Britain should fight the Turks in Mesopotamia: to secure the oil and its pipelines; to guard the threshold of India; to draw grain supplies from the valley of the Euphrates; and to prevent the Turks from using the Baghdad–Basr
a railway link to deliver troops and supplies to the theatre of war.

  With the standing Egyptian army in check, its staff officers playing squash in Cairo while the junior officers led doomed campaigns against the Turks in Sinai, and the British government under duress in Europe, the best that Whitehall could do was to send commands to India with a view to preserving Britain’s interests in the Middle East. In anticipation of Turkish hostilities, India had already sent a Poona Brigade to the Persian Gulf, which subsequently captured Fao, the Turkish fort and cable station at the mouth of the Basra river, and drove the enemy back up the Tigris. Soon two divisions of the Indian army would make further progress in Mesopotamia, under their commander General Nixon, finally capturing Nasiriyeh.

  The British government in India had its own reasons for alienation from Westminster. In his memoirs My Indian Years, the then Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, writes of his conviction that it was in Flanders that the war would be won, and there that London should have concentrated its efforts and terminated the war. He describes the continual demands of the home government for the government of India to send troops, war matériel and supplies to France, East Africa, the Dardanelles, Salonica, and elsewhere. Enumerating the efforts made in India to meet the increasing demands of the War Office, he cites the recruitment of 300,000 Indian troops, and the supply of 70 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 60,000 rifles, 550 guns, plus tents, boots, clothing, and saddlery. By the time the war reached Mesopotamia, India was, in his words, “bled white” and had hardly anything more to give. The hint of an Arab uprising sent his blood pressure rocketing. It was quite impossible, and if it ever succeeded, it would bring havoc to India. He would never support the ambitions of the Sunni Muslim Sharif of Mecca, with all the problems his further elevation would bring from the Shia Muslim sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf maintained by India.