Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  They found that Nasiriyeh, which had just been taken by the British, had turned into an island three miles long. There she met General Brooking—“a fiery little man with a broken heart who lost his only son four months ago in France”—and a Major Hamilton, who turned out to be a cousin of the Stanleys. Charming interlude though it was, certain things worried her. Whenever the local telegraph line was cut, her fiery general was dealing out indiscriminate punishment to friend and foe alike. Her letter to Chirol continued:

  I need not say that it is called strafing. The amount of damage you can do by shelling from the water is almost negligible, and it is always followed by reprisals which get more and more people into trouble—an ever widening circle of unrest and hostility. That’s what I think and I made bold to tell him so. “You’ve been living with the Politicals,” he said, half a snort and half a twinkle. I said why yes, I had lived with Politicals all my life.

  Back in Basra, there were more problems. Heavy labour demanded large numbers of men, and these were being levied by the military without consideration for the families, left without a man to grow the crops or provide a living. She would write to Hardinge of their predicament, she decided. Not only did these things trouble her conscience, but how would the future administration in Mesopotamia win the trust and cooperation of the Arabs after such breaches of human consideration?

  There are many things about which I don’t feel very happy, first and foremost I think is the labour difficulty. There is a very fine line—I sometimes think an invisible line—between what we are doing here and what the Germans did in Belgium. I would rather import labour for war purposes than impress it, much as I dislike importing Indians. It’s not easy, Domnul, you don’t know how difficult my job is here.

  So far the Mesopotamian Campaign had been an unqualified success, but now there was a serious reverse. After the British-led force under General Nixon had routed the Turks from Nasiriyeh, Major-General Charles Townshend and the 6th Division of some ten thousand troops went on to capture the fortress city of Kut. There they wished to regroup and wait for reinforcements, but Nixon—receiving in his turn orders from India—directed them on. From a flotilla of river steamers they launched themselves into battle at Ctesiphon, whose massive arch, photographed many times by Gertrude, could almost be seen from Baghdad. There twenty thousand Turkish troops were well dug in and lying in wait. The advance ceased, and the casualties were soon so heavy that Townshend and his men had to beat a retreat to Kut. It was the beginning of December. Surrounded by the Turks, the unfortunate survivors of the 6th Division were destined to endure the longest siege in British history. Week after week, month after month, and despite three major relief attempts, the soldiers and citizens remained imprisoned within the walls and were soon reduced to eating cats and dogs, then rats. “Nothing happens and nothing seems likely to happen at Kut—it’s a desperate business, Heaven knows how it will end,” she wrote in April.

  Mid-April brought a visit to Basra from Lawrence and Aubrey Herbert on mysterious business from the Cairo Intelligence Bureau. They went straight to Gertrude’s office and sat on her veranda, catching up. Because of their strange commission and unmilitary appearance, they were ostracized by the officers’ mess. Lawrence and Herbert had been authorised to offer up to £2 million to buy off the Turks and relieve the garrison at Kut. As a last resort they would discuss an exchange of wounded, and appeal for clemency for Kut’s Arab population. It was a demeaning exercise, but it was the last effort to stave off an appalling British disaster. Lawrence later described the vehement objections to his mission expressed by the British in Basra, and how two generals had collared him to tell him it was a dishonourable move.

  Lawrence and Herbert sat at table with Gertrude, and it was with Gertrude that they talked. For her, it was an immense relief to be exposed once more to the quick intelligence of Cairo’s brightest: she could not help comparing them with the dull old generals who were her usual lunch companions: “This week has been greatly enlivened by the appearance of Mr. Lawrence, sent out as liaison officer from Egypt. We have had great talks and made vast schemes for the government of the universe. He goes up river to-morrow, where the battle is raging these days.”

  It was, in fact, too late, and the bribe was humiliatingly rejected by the Turkish commander, Halil Pasha. On 29 April, after 147 days, the Turks finally entered Kut and the soldiers were taken prisoner. Four thousand British troops, weakened by starvation, would subsequently die as a result of the hard labour and forced marches. The Arab citizens, although hapless victims of the situation, were appallingly treated by the victorious, an outcome that understandably decided many sections of Arab society against throwing in their lot with the British. Lawrence and Herbert returned to Basra. They were now even more personae non gratae, but Lawrence remained for several days more in Gertrude’s company. Full of concern for the reverses in Mesopotamia, Hugh wrote informing her of the criticism prevalent in England that the authorities in Basra and Delhi were merely “muddling through.” She responded to this with passion, and with an over-arching perspective and an absence of partisanship to be expected of the seasoned stateswoman she was becoming:

  . . . we rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. We treated Mesopotamia as if it were an isolated unit, instead of which it is part of Arabia, its politics indissolubly connected with the great and far reaching Arab question, which presents indeed, different facets as you regard it from different aspects, and is yet always and always one and the same indivisible block. The co-ordinating of Arabian politics and the creation of an Arabia policy should have been done at home . . . there was no one to do it, no one who had ever thought of it, and it was left to our people in Egypt to thrash out, in the face of strenuous opposition from India and London, some sort of wide scheme, which will, I am persuaded, ultimately form the basis of our relations with the Arabs . . . Well, that is enough of politics. But when people talk of our muddling through it throws me into a passion. Muddle through! Why yes so we do—wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.

  She completed her job of collecting tribal information from the Mesopotamian side. She had come to a position of mutual respect with Sir Percy Cox, who wrote of this phase of events:

  The military authorities decided that the particular service for which she had been deputed to Basrah had been completed as far as it could be for the time being, and finding a member of her sex a little difficult to place as a permanency in a military GHQ in the field, they offered her services to me in my capacity of Chief Political Officer—services which were gladly accepted.

  Gertrude had proved herself to him twice over, in the matters of Hayyil and of the generals, and now he began to find her indispensible. Not only was she indefatigable, but she saved him endless time by screening and entertaining his many sheikhly visitors from all over Mesopotamia. She filtered out the unimportant ones, and sent the rest onto Cox’s office with a concise note stating the name of their tribe, where they came from, and what they wanted. He gave her official status as assistant political officer, and the job title of Oriental Secretary. She wrote casually to Chirol of this promotion, but her pleasure in it is evident:

  It never occurred to me to tell you that I am an A.P.O. [Assistant Political Officer] because it’s quite unimportant . . . Sir Percy gave me the title because it is so much more convenient to have a definite official position—though I think at the time his chief motive was to give himself a much firmer hold over me! It would have been quite impossible to be a nondescript with no definite standing. As it is I’m an officer in I.E.F.D [Indian Expeditionary Force D] and have the right to be lodged and fed, and looked after when I’m ill. I’m officially attached . . . And do you know I earn a handsome salary—Rs 300 a month—which is a great deal more than I ever expected to earn in the course of my life and times.

  She worked not only for Cox, but for his workaholic deputy, Captain, later Lieutenant-Colonel, S
ir Arnold Wilson, KCIE, one of the most formidable and eccentric of the Middle East empire-builders. Massively built and with a thick black moustache, he cultivated a lifestyle of Spartan self-denial. In his travels he liked to sleep on the ground without bed or tent, and read the Bible daily. He could ride across country at a hundred miles a day, and on arriving at a river preferred to swim across rather than take the bridge. On one voyage home to England, he saved himself the fare by taking a job as a ship’s stoker, shovelling coal for sixteen hours a day. Disembarking at Marseilles, he bought a bicycle and rode the last nine hundred miles to his family home in Worcester. At first, Gertrude and he got on very well: “He is . . . a most remarkable creature, 34, brilliant abilities, a combined mental and physical power which is extremely rare. I’m devoted to him—he is the best of colleagues and he ought to make a wonderful career. I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone of more extraordinary force.” But his imperialist, dogmatic views were bound to come between them in due course.

  Early in 1916, the War Office finally took on the overall control of operations in Mesopotamia, and poured in troops, aeroplanes, guns, and transport. It was all too late to prevent the agonies of Kut, but it impressed the next important visitor to Basra, in November, the Amir and Hakim of southern Nejd, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. He came on what was almost a royal visit, and inspected the modern scientific world of warfare that Basra had become. If there was any Arab leader whom Gertrude had wished to meet and failed to, it was this charismatic and formidable warrior, hereditary imam, judge, ruler, and governor combined. He was the uncompromising leader of the fundamentalist Wahabi sect, dedicated to returning to the original Islam of the Prophet under the strict guidance of Sharia law. When he was fifteen, Rashid power had driven the Saud tribe into exile and occupied Riyadh, their capital. At twenty-two, with eighty camel riders supplied by his ally against the Rashid, the Sheikh of Kuwait, Ibn Saud fell on Riyadh at night, and with only eight hand-picked followers scaled the palace walls, stabbed the sleeping Rashid, and, as dawn turned the sky pink, threw open the city gates.

  For the next decade, year after year, Ibn Saud made it his business to recover the territories of his fathers. In 1913 he seized the Turkish province of Hasa, formerly an appendage of Riyadh, put the Ottoman garrisons to flight and established himself on the banks of the Persian Gulf. Ibn Saud had become a friend of the British Political Agent at Kuwait, Captain William Shakespear, who had made repeated attempts to convince the British government of the ever-increasing importance of this desert prince. Shortly after the declaration of the First World War, Shakespear went into Nejd and joined the black tents of Ibn Saud, on the march north to repel the latest Rashid attack, backed by the Turks. In that battle Shakespear, though a non-combatant, was killed. Shortly afterwards, Ibn Saud met with Sir Percy Cox, then Chief Political Agent of the Persian Gulf, and concluded a formal agreement with Britain, together with the sheikhs of the Gulf cities of Kuwait and Muhammarah.

  In the course of a few hours, on 27 November 1916, the future founder of Saudi Arabia was welcomed by Cox and Gertrude, then trailed glory through Basra as he was shown all the latest machinery of offence. A magnificent figure with his glittering eyes and his hair plaited and finished with hooks, he toyed with his worry beads as he watched the firing of high explosives at an improvised trench and the launching of anti-aircraft shells. Speaking seldom, he travelled by railway for the first time and was driven at speed in a car to nearby Shaaibah to inspect British infantry and Indian cavalry. He witnessed a battery of artillery in action, and watched a plane go through its paces in the sky. In a base hospital, Gertrude put her hand into the X-ray machine; Ibn Saud followed suit and saw revealed the bones of his own hand. He is definitively portrayed by Gertrude in her essay for Lawrence’s Arab Bulletin—the gazette of secret information circulated to British government offices and edited in Cairo.

  Ibn Saud is barely forty, though he looks some years older. He is a man of splendid physique, standing well over six feet, and carrying himself with the air of one accustomed to command. Though he is more massively built than the typical nomad Sheikh, he has the characteristics of the well bred Arab, the strongly marked aquiline profile, full-fleshed nostrils, prominent lips and long narrow chin, accentuated by a pointed beard. His hands are fine with slender fingers, a trait almost universal among the tribes of pure Arab blood, and in spite of his great height and breadth of shoulder he conveys the impression, common enough in the desert, of an indefinable lassitude, not individual but racial, the secular weariness of an ancient and self-contained people, which has made heavy drafts on its vital forces . . . His deliberate movements, his slow sweet smile and the contemplative glance of his heavy-lidded eyes, though they add to his dignity and charm, do not accord with the Western conception of a vigorous personality. Nevertheless reports credit him with powers of endurance rare even in hard-bitten Arabia. Among men bred in the camel saddle he is said to have few rivals as a tireless rider . . . He is of proved daring, and he combines with his qualities as a soldier that grasp of statecraft which is yet more highly prized by the tribesmen.

  The impression of Gertrude on Ibn Saud was somewhat more equivocal. Cox had already spoken to him of her pre-war expedition to Hayyil, but he had never before come into contact with a European woman. He was reliably reported, however, to have married and then divorced some sixty-five times, passing his women on after a night or two to his sheikhs and followers. That he should be expected to meet this blatantly unveiled woman on anything like an equal footing was, to him, an insult to his manly dignity, and he was dumbfounded by the way important men stood back to let her go first. Furthermore, not only did Gertrude greet Ibn Saud on the friendliest terms, she was deputed to show him around. Cox was to write in diplomatic tone:

  . . . the phenomenon of one of the gentler sex occupying an official position with a British Expeditionary Force was one quite outside his Bedouin comprehension; nevertheless when the time came he met Miss Bell with complete frankness and sangfroid as if he had been associated with European ladies all his life.

  Ibn Saud, too, might have been diplomatic at the time, but later he expressed his real feelings. The political officer Harry St. John Philby, no friend of Gertrude’s at the time of writing, was to state that “many a Najdi audience has been tickled to uproarious merriment by his mimicking of her shrill voice and feminine patter: ‘Abdul Aziz [Ibn Saud]! Abdul Aziz! Look at this, and what do you think of that?’ and so forth.” Ibn Saud was, perhaps, the only Arab sheikh who mocked her; revealingly, he was also perhaps the only important sheikh she had met on Western rather than Bedouin terms. Had she come to his tent in the desert, in evening dress, and presented him with binoculars and guns, had she sat on his carpets with him and spoken fluently to him in terms of his own culture, poetry, and the politics of the desert, she would have impressed him as she had so easily impressed Yahya Beg, Muhammad Abu Tayyi, Fahad Beg, and the rest.

  The visit over, Gertrude worked on through appalling weather conditions, not knowing if it was preferable in winter, with all roads turned to mud and planks bridging the open drains, or in summer when, to a Yorkshirewoman born and bred, the heat was unbearable: “Last night I woke at 1 am to find the temperature still over 100 and myself lying in a pool. My silk nightgown goes into the bath with me in the morning, is wrung out and needs no more bother” . . . “one’s bath water, drawn from a tank on the roof, is never under 100 . . . but it doesn’t steam—the air’s hotter,” she wrote to her parents. With the constant washing, her clothes were dropping to pieces. She was having to get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to mend them—something her maid Marie had always done for her in England. Her desperate requests for clothes were sometimes fruitful:

  One wears almost nothing, fortunately, still it’s all the more essential that that nothing should not be in holes . . . To think that I was once clean and tidy! . . . Thank you so much—I have a lace evening gown, a white crepe gown, a stripy blue muslin gown, two shirts and a
stripy silk gown, all most suitable . . . and the box and umbrella have come too!

  But she was often disappointed, as a letter of 20 January 1917 reveals:

  A box has just arrived from Marte—it ought to have contained a black satin gown, but it has been opened and the gown has been abstracted. Isn’t it infuriating? All that was left was a small cardboard box inside, containing the little black satin coat Marte sent with the gown, some net, and a gold flower . . .

  She missed having a family of her own even more, now, in the almost exclusively male world that she occupied. She felt the lack of a woman friend, but almost the only women she met were Lady Cox, her boss’s wife, the occasional temporary teacher or missionary, and “the notable Miss Jones”—the likeable but very busy matron of the officers’ hospital and rest house down river. Gertrude was her grateful patient when, exhausted by temperatures of around 107 degrees combined with Basra’s lack of good food, she went down with a bad bout of jaundice in September that year. She wrote to Florence: “Do you know I’ve never been so ill as this before. I hadn’t an idea what it was like to feel so deadly weak that you couldn’t move your body much nor hold your mind at all.”

  After her convalescence, she returned to writing her reports. She told Hugh and Florence:

  The amount I’ve written during the last year is appalling. Some of it is botched together out of reports, some spun out of my own mind and former knowledge, and some an attempt to fix the far corners of the new world we are discovering now, and some dry as dust tribal analyses, dull, but perhaps more useful than most things . . . But it’s sometimes exasperating to be obliged to sit in an office when I long to be out in the desert, seeing the places I hear of, and finding out about them for myself . . . One can’t do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it.