“Botched together . . . dry as dust . . . dull”—never was Gertrude more disingenuous. She knew that her essays were beginning to be celebrated by the high commands in India, Egypt, the Sudan, and London for their lively and often humorous clarifications of political situations and for their crisply entertaining character portraits. In another letter home she admits as much: “Happy to tell you that I hear my utterances receive a truly preposterous attention in London.”
Some reports she wrote as part of her duty to the Arab Bureau, or as contributions to the Arab Bulletin. They added to her fame as perhaps the most prominent British personality in the Middle East. Some of her other essays, collected together as The Arab of Mesopotamia, were produced as an instruction manual for British officers on arrival in Basra. Forbiddingly entitled The Pax Britannica in the Occupied Territories of Mesopotamia; or The Basis of Government in Turkish Arabia, these pieces would turn out to be delightfully easy to enjoy while telling the neophyte officer all he needed to know. Turning to an essay on “Star Worshippers,” he would learn that the tenets of this strange sect entailed living next to running water, practising polygamy, and believing that the world is actually a great egg; also, that they had invented a book which could be read simultaneously by two priests sitting on either side of a stream. “One wonders how this curious growth will fare in the new soil of British administration,” Gertrude remarked.
“Officialdom,” wrote Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, director of the Arab Bureau from 1916, “could never spoil the freshness and vividness of her style or the terseness of her descriptions. Throughout them all can be seen the breadth of her knowledge, and her sympathy and understanding for the people whom she loved so well.” Tired politicians and hard-pressed political officers working through their in-trays would have turned with relief and anticipation to the polished résumés signed “G.L.B.” She was in a class of her own when describing the government of Turkish Arabia as a fiction: “No country which turned to the eye of the world an appearance of established rule and centralized Government was, to a greater extent than the Ottoman Empire, a land of make-believe”; or when detailing the intricacies of the internal politics of Muscat—“Sultan Seyyid Feisal ibn Turki saw in the suppression of the arms trade by the British Government a distinct advantage to himself, since his rebellious subjects became unable to furnish themselves with weapons to use against him”—or when explaining the tribal fights of the Shamiyah, which meant “the taking of an enemy by a surprise raid . . . the casualties may be in some cases more, in others rather less, than those of a football match.”
Gertrude’s letters to Florence, Hugh, and the rest of her family were as beautifully written, more personal but sometimes as far-reaching. Writing home two or three times a week was a sacred commitment, a substitute for spending time with them, subsequently almost an apology for hardly ever returning home. It became ever more difficult to envisage going back for a visit, what with the laborious journey and the length of time that she would have to be away, not to speak of all that she would be missing in this eastern sphere of the war.
Keeping in touch with the people she loved, most of all her father, was an escape from the arid, lonely, masculine world of work and war. The letters centred her, reminding her of who she was and where she came from. She could always interest herself in her father’s affairs, whether political or commercial, but it sometimes occurred to her that the interests of Florence, Elsa, and Molly, even of Maurice and Hugo, were on a very different scale to her own. We know that she often massaged or omitted the facts, to spare them anxiety, and took trouble not to write too much of Mesopotamian affairs for fear of boring them. Just as when she had worked in the Wounded and Missing Office, Gertrude occasionally had to absorb accounts of atrocities and massacres, without anyone to confide in or distract her from the nightmare scenarios that these events opened out before her. She felt the lack of a husband and family more than ever now. At home Molly, and Elsa to a lesser extent, with their growing families and urgent domestic concerns, smiled over her importance and called her, however affectionately, “the Great Gertrude.” Meanwhile she wrote back of their preoccupations as if they were as important to her as the affairs of the nation. Only to Chirol did she come close to admitting the truth: “The only interesting letters I have—except yours—are from the Arab Bureau in Egypt. I write to them weekly and they keep me pretty well posted as to Hejaz and Syrian matters . . . My family write nothing except about their own affairs, which I like to hear too, bless them.”
Cox and Gertrude, now working hand in hand and alongside Wilson and other staff, had done much to establish order in the Basra vilayet, pursuing beneficial policies in relation to agriculture, finance, law, and education. They brought local sheikhs into the process of government, and paid them to rule their traditional districts. Unfortunately, this first foray into Arab self-determination was dissipated in corruption and mismanagement. British administrators had to be sent to work alongside the sheikhs in the remoter districts.
The winter campaign under General Maude saw the recovery of Kut and the advance on Baghdad, which was occupied by British forces on 11 March 1917. The centre of gravity moved north, and Gertrude awaited Sir Percy’s summons to join him in Baghdad to set up a nucleus for his new Secretariat. She wrote home:
I had a letter from Sir Percy to-day, from the Front, full of exultation and confidence . . . It’s the first big success of the war, and I think it is going to have varied and remarkable consequences. We shall, I trust, make it a great centre of Arab civilization, a prosperity; that will be my job partly, I hope, and I never lose sight of it . . . I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be in at the birth, so to speak, of a new administration.
The call came, and she went up river on a crowded steamer: nine days in the humid heat with a couple of nurses and six hundred troops. At Rounton, the Bells received a two-word telegram: “Address Bagdad.”
There were many such as Arnold Wilson who remained convinced that only complete British control would secure the oil supply for the British navy and the Empire. Equally there were people like Hardinge, who believed that any form of Arab partnership would lead to chaos in the Middle East and deprive the Empire of its links between Europe, India, and the rest of the East. They were to be proved wrong. By means of the blending of British administration with Arab self-determination and pride, good government was about to be established. Stability would go on very nearly unbroken until 1920, the oil would continue to flow, and a benevolent British interest would be maintained. The sensitivity to Middle Eastern minds and attitudes that Gertrude brought to the administration would enable her to achieve what nobody believed was possible. This was the great task that lay ahead of her in Baghdad.
Twelve
GOVERNMENT THROUGH GERTRUDE
Gertrude had anticipated her arrival in Baghdad for weeks, and longed to live once more in that great city where she had many friends already. With relief she disembarked from the overloaded boat and made her way through the steamy, crowded quayside to where Cox’s car was waiting. At the office she received a warm welcome from her chief and his handful of staff. She did not know where she would be spending the night, but after twelve months in a single room in the Basra headquarters she hoped for something more spacious, and cooler. She was reassured to hear that a house had been allotted to her, and set off in the car again, address in hand.
The car stopped in a dirty, noisy little bazaar. A sycophantic landlord appeared and ushered her into a stifling box of a house without running water or a stick of furniture. She had brought a few pieces from Basra, but they were not yet unloaded; her servant Mikhail had remained with the boat to collect them. However, experienced voyager as she was, she had not parted with her old canvas bed and bath, which she now set up in the grubby rooms: “I unpacked my box which had been dropped into the Tigris, and hung out all the things to dry on the railings . . . It was breathlessly hot. I hadn’t so much as a chair to put things on, and when I wanted
water for washing I had to open my front door and call in the help of the bazaar.”
She dined with Sir Percy, then returned to the house to sleep. Later, she was awakened by a hammering on the door. It was Mikhail, arriving with the rest of her luggage. Morning came with all the heat and noise of inner-city Baghdad: “I confess that after having done my hair and breakfasted on the floor I felt a little discouraged.”
She would not bother Cox: she was here on exactly the same terms as the rest of his staff, and he had more important things to do. She put on her straw hat and set out on foot to find a better house, making her way down to the cooler, tree-shaded spaces by the river, near to the political office in the pre-war Austrian embassy. She came almost at once to an old wall surrounding a large overgrown garden with cool trees and a profusion of pink roses. Peering through the iron gate she saw a stone water-tank at the end of a short drive, and beyond it, not a house, but three run-down summer-houses, with birds perched on the roofs. Part of the property was an extensive date-palm garden—a place where it would be cool to walk in the evening.
Sometimes the places where we live for important parts of our lives seem to find us, and so it was with Gertrude in April 1917. Here was the lovely spot where she would live for the rest of her life. Making enquiries of the neighbours, she discovered that the garden belonged to a wealthy proprietor she knew and liked, Musa Chalabi. A visit to his home resolved all that needed to be resolved, and the next ten days were spent in rapid alterations and repairs. In early May she installed herself in the first of the summer-houses, and then moved from one to the other as a modern kitchen and bathroom were added. She had everything painted white, and employed a gardener, a cook, and an old man she knew and trusted, Shamao, to run the household. Sun-blinds were put up at all the windows, plants and wicker furniture installed on the deep wooden verandas. She put up her two writing desks and filled all her vases with flowers. The furthest building she turned over to accommodation for the servants, and before long there were women hanging out washing while a baby played in the grass at their feet. She had at last a home and a garden of her own. She planted beds of cottage flowers—iris, verbena, chrysanthemums—violets in pots, yellow hollyhock seeds sent from Darlington, and cabbages. A short while later she was able to boast that she had managed to get daffodils into flower—the first ever seen in Mesopotamia. She wrote home on the 17th:
Oh my dearest ones it’s so wonderful here—I can’t tell you how much I’m loving it . . . I wonder what inheritance from Cumbrian farmers can have developed unexpectedly into so compelling an at-home-ness with the East?
I have grown to love this land, its sights and its sounds. I never weary of the East, just as I never feel it to be alien. I cannot feel exiled here; it is a second native country. If my family were not in England I should have no wish to return.
She scarcely missed a day’s work. She was needed as never before, but she had to prove herself all over again. In his sketch of this period when government was being established in Iraq, Cox wrote:
When I told [the GOC] that some of my office staff were coming up from Basra, including Miss Bell, [he] expressed considerable misgiving at the news, as he feared her arrival might form an inconvenient precedent for appeals from other ladies, but I reminded him that her services had been specifically offered to me by his predecessor as an ordinary member of my Secretariat; that I regarded and treated her no differently from any male officer of my Staff, and that her particular abilities could be very useful to me at the present moment. In due course she arrived and was not long in establishing happy personal relations with Sir Stanley Maude.
The forging of these “happy personal relations” described by Cox, the consummate diplomat, were no doubt much to Gertrude’s credit, but she made her real feelings clear to her family after Maude’s death from cholera a few months later, when Hugh had written to ask her what she had thought of him. It was Maude’s brilliant military campaign that had won Baghdad and almost effaced the tragedy of Kut from the public mind, but he was a man of limited perspective and had made the work of the administrators more difficult. The objection to the presence of a woman in a man’s world, even in the rare instance of that woman’s being supremely well qualified to be there, had several times in her life been couched in terms of a concession to one precipitating some “monstrous regiment” to follow. This was bound to exasperate Gertrude. Her brief portrait of Maude is scathing and, despite his recent death, unmitigated in its contempt, not so much for the man, but for the type of military mind she had so often had to fight as a woman and as an administrator:
General Maude was essentially a soldier; he had no knowledge of statecraft and regarded it as totally unnecessary . . . He was determined beyond the verge of obstinacy, a narrow intelligence confined to one channel and the more forcible for its concentration. I knew him very little . . . If he had lived there would have been a desperate tussle when administrative problems began to become more important than military. The time was near when questions which he had insisted on regarding as purely administrative and therefore of no immediate concern . . . could no longer be neglected or treated on purely military lines.
The army wins the territory, and the administration takes over: but in Mesopotamia the struggle to install conditions conducive to peace and eventual prosperity would prove as daunting as the battlefront itself. The prospect for the nucleus British administration in Baghdad was dismal, the future opaque. Roughly half of Mesopotamia was under precarious British control, but the Turks were fighting on in the north. Arabs spoke a common language but were not a common people. Mesopotamia was not a country but a province of a derelict empire. Iraq was not a nation. The very names caused confusion. Mesopotamia, Greek for “between the rivers,” was the historic and archaeological term used in the West for what the Arabs called “Al Iraq,” “the Iraq.” The Arab term originally referred to the area of the Basra vilayet and Kuwait in the south, but when they took over, the British used it to describe the territory of the three vilayets Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. In 1932, at full independence, the country was officially recognized as “Iraq.”
In 1917, practical difficulties confronted the British in all directions. Lack of food was the most urgent, for many of the irrigation systems necessary to agriculture had crumbled from neglect, and much of what was left had been destroyed in the war. The two opposing armies had consumed any food surplus, and as the Turks had withdrawn to the north, they had followed what was virtually a scorched-earth policy, taking any valuables and destroying any crops they could not consume. Even the climate had done its worst, and the famously fertile Euphrates basin was facing its third growing season without rain. The population was becoming hungry, and disease was spreading. In the cities the sanitation system had collapsed, and the one hospital in Baghdad—formerly the British Residency—was discovered to be in an indescribable condition, with a few horribly wounded men struggling to maintain life. In the countryside, the farmers were eating their seed grain instead of planting it, for anything they grew had been confiscated, time and again. No one knew who would now own the land, or who would have to pay what taxes. Starvation, disaffection, and lawlessness could well be just around the corner. If the administration could not pull the country together at once and get it running, if Basra and Baghdad collapsed into anarchy, the army of some hundred thousand troops would not be able to hold the country down. Administrative problems were compounded by lack of funds from His Majesty’s Government and an absence of military cooperation, until the welcome arrival of Maude’s more amenable successor, Lieutenant-General Sir William Marshall.
In spite of these massive difficulties, there was a noble determination on the part of Cox and his staff to get it right. They were dedicated to instituting benevolent, effective government and to serving honourably the peoples of the Basra and Baghdad vilayets with their multitudinous identities and problems. It was the idea above all that inspired and excited Gertrude:
Nowhere in t
he war-shattered universe can we begin more speedily to make good the immense losses sustained by humanity . . . It’s an immense opportunity, just at this time when the atmosphere is so emotional; one catches hold of people as one will never do again, and establishes relations which won’t dissolve. It is not for my own sake, but because it greases the wheels of administration—it really does, and I want to watch it all very carefully almost from day to day, so as to be able to take what I hope may be . . . a decisive hand in [the] final disposition. I shall be able to do that, I shall indeed, with the knowledge I’m gaining. It’s so intimate. They are beyond words outgoing to me. What does anything else matter when the job is such a big one? There never was anything quite like this before, you must understand that—it’s amazing.
It’s the making of a new world.
After the British defeat at Kut, the army, now reinforced and led by General Maude, had begun again to roll back the Turkish mantle. Like the roof being stripped from a derelict house, it exposed to the daylight the rotten timbers, rat-infested rooms, and insanitary corners of a moribund empire. For some five hundred years the Turks had exploited Mesopotamia: their officials with sinecures in the Baghdad offices had maintained their comfortable lifestyles by disguising the reality under a sea of paper. The good government that it purported to document was nothing more than make-believe. Corruption was condoned throughout the Empire; most of its operatives, either unsalaried or paid a pittance, lived on bribery and extortion. The building and maintenance of municipal and provincial public works, roads and bridges, sanitation and lighting, houses, hospitals, schools—all had been recorded on paper, but had never been carried out. Infant mortality was as high as ever.
Turkish bureaucracy had imposed its dark empire over the length and breadth of Mesopotamia by a policy of division and dominance. The language of law, business, administration, and education was Turkish, not Arabic. The peasant farmers were forced to pay rent in lieu of tax to the new urban owners of their land, selected by the Turks, and very little of that rent found its way back into improvement of their farms. The traders in the towns had had to buy a permit every time they made a sale or a purchase, imported or exported. The chosen few amassed wealth from their privileged positions. A court case was won in Baghdad only by payment to the judge, who might have no qualifications for his position. An appeal against a legal decision could be lost for years, even decades, in the Kafkaesque courts of Constantinople, after which it would be referred back again to Baghdad.
Gertrude Bell Page 34
