Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  In India, the Viceroy ruled the largest population of Muslims in the world, and the demands made on him by the War Office were already causing considerable difficulty. The Turkish army was almost entirely Muslim—Turks and Arabs recruited from the desert. Sending Indian army troops, many of them Muslims, to fight the Turks in Mesopotamia meant that the British were effectively pitting Muslim soldier against Muslim soldier. This was further complicated by the allegiance that Indian Muslims gave to the traditional ruler of Ottoman Turkey, the Caliph. For the Viceroy it was therefore beyond comprehension that Britain should invite even more dissension among Muslims by promoting an Arab revolt against the Turkish Muslim regime. India’s prominent pan-Islamic institutions, Kudam-I-kaaba and the Central Committee of All India Muslims, were pro-Turkish. On the North-West Frontier, too, an Arab revolt would bring universal condemnation. At present, as British cipher messages from Simla to London pointed out, they had succeeded in securing a precarious peace and quiet throughout these hotspots of civil unrest and religious fervour. For the moment, the Colonial Office was in agreement with the Viceroy that an Arab revolt would not be helpful; London and Delhi were convinced that in any case it would never materialize, and that if it ever did, it would be doomed to failure.

  Nevertheless, by the spring of 1915 Lawrence was itching to leave map-making and return to the sphere of action. He had formulated a plan “to roll up Syria by way of the Hedjaz in the name of the Sherif . . . we can rush right up to Damascus, and biff the French out of all hope of Syria.” To him “it felt like morning, and the freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us.” For Gertrude, with her aching heart, it felt very different. Devastated by the death of the man she had loved, worn thin from reorganizing and running the Wounded and Missing Offices, the Gertrude who had arrived in Cairo was a wounded creature. At the turn of the year she reflected on the emotional turmoil that had been 1915, and wrote first to Florence and then to her father a heartbroken lament for Doughty-Wylie. Sometimes she prayed that she would never have to bear another year like the last, and sometimes she found herself thinking that it had all been worth it for those few days of happiness:

  I wonder, if I could choose, whether I would not have the past year again, for the wonder it held, and bear the sorrow again. And dearest, not least of all the wonder would be your kindness and love . . . I don’t speak of these things now; it’s best to keep silence. But you know that they are always in my mind.

  Darling, darling Father . . . there never could be words in which to say to you what you have been to me. No one has helped another as you have helped me, and to tell you what your love and sympathy meant is more than I know how to do . . . I still can’t write of it; but you know, don’t you?

  Her recent depression and overwork resulted, towards the end of January, in a brief physical collapse. Most unusually, she complained of exhaustion, and to remedy it she began getting up early in order to ride out into the desert for a morning gallop. It would be the last time she admitted to looking back. Work, as always, was to be her renaissance, and as always she subordinated her feelings to the job in hand. Keep silence as she might, it is more than likely that she talked of her loss and sorrow with Lawrence, who was also in mourning for his beloved brother Will, a pilot who had joined the Royal Flying Corps and been shot down in September just before Gertrude’s arrival. Lawrence, perhaps with Hogarth and Woolley, may have helped her to pay her final respects at Doughty-Wylie’s grave. In any case, she now got to know and appreciate the fine qualities, as well as the considerable shortcomings, of this unusual colleague. Gertrude and her “dear boy” became friends. The two were destined to become the Bureau’s most famous recruits, pursuing their dreams and realizing them against all odds. Lawrence would be the first to live his legend, and when she heard of his exploits, she would pause over her mounds of paperwork and long for freedom and action again.

  As an agency of the British government, the ultimate aim of the Bureau had to be winning the war. They knew that an Arab rebellion against the Turks was their only hope, and they knew that it was a possibility. By 1914 disaffection was common among the Arabian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Gertrude in her conversations with the Jebel Druze as early as 1905 had noted the beginnings of a movement towards independence. The people of Najaf and Karbala had turned against the Turks in Mesopotamia, and the Arab Independence Movement had begun in Basra, although this was being engineered by the unscrupulous Sayyid Talib chiefly for his own ends. At the same time, the Bureau knew perfectly well that pan-Arab independence was impossible. Allegiance amongst all tribes in the Middle East? It was hard enough to get two sheikhs to sit down together! Gertrude set out the reasons in one of her crystal-clear information papers:

  Political union is a conception unfamiliar to a society which is still highly coloured by its tribal origins and maintains in its midst so many strongly disruptive elements of tribal organization . . . The conditions of nomad life have no analogy with those of the cultivated areas and not infrequently the direct interests of the tribes are incompatible with those of the settled areas . . . It is well to dismiss from the outset the anticipation that there exists any individual who could be set up as a head or a figure-head for the Arab provinces as a whole . . . The sole individual who might be regarded as a possible figure-head is the King of the Hejaz, but though he might become the representative of religious union among the Arabs, he would never have any real political significance. Mesopotamia being preponderately Shi’ah, his name carries no weight there . . . His religious position is an asset; it is probably the only element of union which can be found. But it cannot be converted into political supremacy.

  The fact remained that there was only one inducement for the tribes to unite against the Turks and counter their call to anti-British Jihad—the duty to respond to a call to fight for God—and that was the notion of Arab freedom and independence . . . or something like it. There was already the half-promise of that outcome, made by Kitchener, which could not be disowned. The issue was further compromised by the Hussain–McMahon correspondence. Every one of the Arab Bureau personnel knew that in their efforts to raise a revolt they would be living a half-lie. For Lawrence and Gertrude particularly, with their respect and love for the Arabs, it was a dilemma that would occupy them for the rest of their lives. Lawrence would inscribe his legend across the Hejaz with the agonizing sense of betraying his Arab friends, and admit it more than once in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

  The Arab Revolt had begun on false pretences. To gain the Sherif’s help our Cabinet had offered, through Sir Henry McMahon, to support the establishment of native governments . . . the Arabs . . . asked me, as a free agent, to endorse the promises of the British Government . . . I could see that if we won the war the promises to the Arabs were dead paper . . . Yet the Arab inspiration was our main tool in winning the Eastern war . . . but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed.

  Gertrude had no intention of taking any action of which she would be ashamed. She would use her brilliant intellect and her formidable ability to deliver that promise to the Arabs. She would change hearts and minds, she would explain every aspect and ramification of the issue to its best advantage, she would blend British administration with Arab self-determination and pride and do her best to see good government established. She would find a way to establish an Arab state alongside a benevolent British administration and produce genuine political cohesion.

  Gertrude and Lawrence were not alone in their wish for self-determination for the Arabs, bolstered and stabilized by British advisers. While the “think tank” that was the Arab Bureau believed to a man that the multiplicity of races and tribes and beliefs made it impossible to form a single coherent nation with effective political institutions, they were pragmatic men of integrity. They would resist all attempts by India to annex Mesopotamia and to substitute the Raj for the Ottoman Empire. While the British in India had been able to tap into and domi
nate a universal Indian system based on the rule of the maharajahs, the Middle East allowed of no such easy entry. The Arab system derived from descent from the Prophet and other figures of religious pre-eminence, and it was from this that the leading families drew their moral and temporal power. Their hold over their sources of wealth was sufficient for them to extend patronage to lesser leaders and their tribes. Gertrude’s grasp of the situation and her political acumen, her persuasive clarity in presenting issues of enormous complexity, were most valuable additions to the collective determination of the Bureau to find the way ahead.

  Clear thinking, though, was somewhat hard to come by. As one commentator points out, there were around twenty separate government and military departments involved at any one time in the formulation of British policy in the Middle East during the First World War: the War Cabinet, the Admiralty, and the War Office each had their own point of view; there were the rival India Office and Foreign Office; then the bureaucracies in India, Egypt, and the Sudan, which also had plenty to say on the subject. Three major expeditionary forces were stationed in Mesopotamia, Ismailia, and Alexandria, and there were naval and political establishments in four other major areas. No wonder there were crossed lines of communication, and that the promises made to the Arabs should differ in content and intention. Indeed, the Anglo-Arab understanding would be beset with misunderstandings, deriving principally from that initial correspondence between McMahon and Sharif Hussain, and the retrogressive Anglo-French agreement rattled off by the intemperate Sykes and France’s Georges-Picot in May 1916, of which Gertrude and her then boss would not be informed for a further two years.

  There was the sense, in the Bureau, of a secret agenda. They even gave themselves a name: the “Intrusives.” Lawrence wrote of their subversive intention of infiltrating the corridors of power to “foster the new Arabic world.” Their first convert was the High Commissioner himself, the efficient, loyal, but unimaginative Sir Henry McMahon. Subjected to the steady seepage of Gilbert Clayton’s persuasive influence and already disillusioned by the failure of the military in Sinai, with their complacent and inflexible views, he was the first to understand and approve.

  The Intrusives held their views on Arab self-determination in opposition to Delhi. They could hardly move ahead with their plans for an Arab uprising without support from India, and they were not going to get it. The Viceroy and his government in India believed vehemently that British rule should be imposed over all Arabs, and that it would succeed as it had succeeded in the Raj. After all, they had managed to run India with only fifty thousand British troops. The view in Cairo was more realistic. As the war dragged on, Britain would have little hope of financing imperialist governments in a new continent. The Bureau played that card for all it was worth, pointing out that influence cost less than control.

  In the intense, lengthy debates that Gertrude now joined, they explored the possibility of defeating the Turks by other, “non-British” methods of warfare: by funding insurrection, cutting railway lines, hijacking supplies, fostering terrorism, leading guerrilla warfare. Gertrude’s participation, and her knowledge of Arab methods and customs, helped them crystallize these ideas. She was, after all, probably the only one among them—explorers, desert travellers all—who had actually taken part in a ghazzu. It would be possible to assemble an Arab army against the Turks, she said, if the men’s pride in the notion of Arab self-determination was strong enough. There would have to be considerable funds made available. Money would be needed for two reasons: because it was impossible to move through a sheikh’s territory without payment, and because neither the Bedouin nor the desert villagers would leave their camel herds or homes to fight, unless the family income they would be losing was replaced from another source. The Arab fighter was a mercenary, not a volunteer.

  The Indian government remained determined to extend its authority in Arabia and to annex Mesopotamia. The Viceroy made his feelings clear in a stinging letter to the Foreign Office:

  I devoutly hope that this proposed Arab state will fall to pieces, if it is ever created. Nobody could possibly have devised a scheme more detrimental to British interests in the Middle East than this. It simply means misgovernment, chaos and corruption, since there never can be and never has been any consistency or cohesion among the Arab tribes . . . I cannot tell you how detrimental I think this interference and influence from Cairo has been.

  With this letter, he engendered opposition to the Bureau from London as well.

  By then Gertrude had finished her initial report on the tribes, which was received by General Headquarters with mounting respect for its completeness and detail. Having supplied what she had been asked for, she might now quite respectably have returned to a depressed wartime England, the Wounded and Missing Office, and a London full of sad memory. Instead she reflected on the damaging feud between Cairo and Delhi and on the determinations of the Viceroy. Lord Hardinge, the grand and highly decorated former ambassador at St. Petersburg and Paris, personally chosen and officially approved adviser to the King on foreign affairs, was none other than Gertrude’s old friend from the days of snowy walks in Bucharest, Charles Hardinge. Knowing him as she did, and understanding the problems as she did, was there anything she could do to improve matters between India and Cairo? “It is essential India and Egypt should keep in the closest touch since they are dealing with two sides of the same problem,” she would write to Captain Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence in London, on 20 February 1916.

  Gertrude talked to Clayton: Might she go to Delhi? The ostensible reason for her journey would be to complete her tribal data with information that she could get only from India’s Foreign Department. Comprehending as the Intrusives did that there could be no pan-Arab nation, but unable to broadcast the fact because it had been held out by Kitchener to Hussain as a possibility, her real agenda would be to reassure Hardinge that Cairo understood just as well as Delhi that such a nation could never exist, but that, as the only reason for the Arab tribes to unite against the Turks, the pretence had to be maintained, however uncomfortable. She would put the case for employing new tactics against the Turks, and try to open the minds of those who ran the Raj to the possibilities of Arab guerrilla warfare. She was already, privately, forming a complicated scheme to foster Arab self-determination despite all.

  If Hardinge had a close friend in India with him at the time, it was the distinguished Times correspondent Sir Valentine Ignatius Chirol, Gertrude’s “dearest Domnul,” to whom she now sent a cable. The man who understood better than anyone how much she had loved Doughty-Wylie, and whose kindly disposition had caused him much anxiety about her, Chirol had mentioned to Hardinge that she had been ill and depressed and was now working in an official capacity in Cairo. Through Domnul’s good auspices, Gertrude now received a warm invitation from the Viceroy.

  In a letter written at the end of January, Clayton showed his unqualified approval of her plan, and his confidence in her ability to carry out this complex and crucial piece of diplomacy. He hints at the real purpose of her journey:

  . . . the people in India cling so firmly to the wrong end of the stick that they are hard to deal with. Miss Gertrude Bell is leaving here today for India, partly at my instigation and with the full approval of the High Commissioner. She is, as you know, one of the great authorities on Arabia and Syria and has been working under me for some months. She is fully conversant with the Arab questions and entirely agrees with our policy. As she is an intimate friend of the Viceroy and of Sir Valentine Chirol (who carries much weight), and is going to stay with the Viceroy, I think that she may succeed in inducing a better impression of what the Arab question really means.

  Hardinge was to write later, in his memoirs:

  It was at this time that I heard that Miss Gertrude Bell, whom I had known many years before as the niece of Sir Frank Lascelles, and who was employed in the Military Intelligence Department at Cairo, was ill and unhappy on account of the death of a very great friend in th
e operations at Gallipoli. I asked her to come to pay me a visit at Delhi, where she would have an opportunity of studying the Arab information at the disposal of the Foreign Department.

  Gertrude now wrote a letter to her father in which she slightly rearranges the order of events. With her anxiety for Hugh’s good opinion in all matters, and in view of the magnitude of the politics which she was proposing to manipulate, she wanted to deflect any impression he might get that his daughter was becoming over-ambitious or self-important:

  When I got Lord H’s message through Domnul I suggested that it might be a good plan if I, a quite unimportant and unofficial person, were to take advantage of the Viceroy’s invitation and go out to see what could be done by putting this side of the case before them . . . My chief has approved . . . So I’m going. I feel a little anxious about it, but take refuge in my own extreme obscurity and the general kindness I find everywhere. The pull one has in being so unofficial is that if one doesn’t succeed, no one is any the worse. I shall find Domnul at Delhi which will make everything easy, otherwise I don’t think I should have the face to set out on a political mission.

  Excitement soon overtook anxiety. On 28 January, as she threw her clothes into a case, she dashed off another letter: “I’m off finally at a moment’s notice to catch a troop ship at Suez. I really do the oddest things. I learnt at 3 pm that I could catch it if I left at 6 pm which did not allow much time for thought. I’m charged with much negotiation—and I hope I may be well inspired.”

  An officer who was at Cairo at the time was to tell Florence that he never saw anyone mobilize as quickly as Miss Bell.

  The new name “Intrusive” fitted her perfectly. It was what she had been all her life. She had achieved her purposes in the desert by intruding into the Bedouin camps. She had intruded into the corridors of power by directly approaching the statesmen she knew and supplying the information they required. Now she was planning her most important venture so far: she was about to intrude into the crucial determinations of the British Empire.