Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  The people of Mesopotamia had been presented with powerful indicators that the British would be replaced: Cox had talked of self-determination, President Wilson had insisted that all “nationalities” should be “assured . . . an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development,” the Franco-British Declaration had promised it, and the mandate would reinforce it. In contrast to those Arabs seeking power for themselves and the wilder of the tribes who wanted no government at all, was the mass of sober citizens, businessmen, landowners, and sheikhs who wanted a continuance of the orderly administration that allowed them to maintain their livelihoods. Their ideal was an Arab government with British support.

  To Kurds, Christians, Jews, and the residual Turks, this would mean that they would be subservient minorities to whatever Arab majority was put in place. To the Arabs, self-determination brought to the fore the fundamental split between the majority Shias—unworldly, apolitical—and the minority Sunnis—educated, powerful, financially astute. If these two communities were to form a government, they would have to form a united religious front first. Sunnis and Shias began to attend certain religious meetings together. In May 1920, in every Sunni and Shia mosque, the festival of Ramadhan brought the assemblies known as mauluds, held in tribute to the birth of the Prophet. There, political speeches were made and patriotic poetry recited: the excitement was intense and spilled out into the streets. The next month, Gertrude was commenting: “The Nationalist propaganda increases. There are constant meetings in mosques . . . The extremists are out for independence, without a mandate. They play for all they are worth on the passions of the mob and what with the Unity of Islam and the Rights of the Arab Race they make a fine figure. They have created a reign of terror.”

  How to reach out to the Shias, those grimly devout citizens of the holy cities, was a major problem for the British administration. The religious leadership in citadels such as Najaf and Kadhimain would never accept rule by the infidels. At a time when the wives of the political officers were being sent back to England out of harm’s way, Gertrude was fearless in penetrating these bastions ruled by the mujtahids, each of whom had studied for twenty years in order to reach the status of priestly scholar. Their merest word commanded obedience. Gertrude wrote:

  There they sit in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can’t see through it . . . And for the most part they are very hostile to us, a feeling we can’t alter because it’s so difficult to get at them . . . Until quite recently I’ve been wholly cut off from them because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil.

  The Sadr of Kadhimain, perhaps the chief Shia family, at last put out sufficient feelers for Gertrude to offer, with all courtesies, to visit them. Escorted by a free-thinking Baghdad Shia, someone she knew well, she made her way through the narrow, crooked streets to the house of the mujtahid Sayyid Hassan and stopped before a small archway. She entered a dark, vaulted passage fifty yards long, then emerged into the velvet silence of an ancient courtyard. She was led through shuttered verandas into the presence of the bearded mujtahid, who sat on a carpet before her in his black robe and formidably large turban. Formal greetings over, he began to talk in the rolling periods of the book-learned man. “I was acutely conscious of the fact that no woman before me had ever been invited to drink coffee with a mujtahid and listen to his discourse,” Gertrude recorded, “and really anxious lest I shouldn’t make a good impression.”

  They discussed Arab libraries, French intentions in the Middle East, and Bolshevism. She stayed two hours, at the end of which the mujtahid complimented her on being the most learned woman of her time, and invited her to visit him as often as she liked.

  For Gertrude, much of 1919 and 1920 was marked by feelings of anger over the protracted and ill-informed decisions being made in Europe over the Middle East. Prominent moderate Arabs were continually dropping in to remind her that three years had elapsed since Arab government had first been promised, and nothing had yet materialized.

  Doubts about the British agenda were matched by confusion over the Iraqi-Syrian border on the upper Euphrates. At the end of 1919, as British troop numbers were being reduced, there was a major incident at Dair al Zor. The inhabitants had requested that a British officer be sent there to maintain law and order. The officer, Captain Chamier, arrived, only to find Arab representatives from Syria already in place. Chamier succeeded in getting the Arabs recalled to Damascus, and was attempting to clarify his orders when a local leader raised a force of two thousand fanatical tribesmen to retaliate by attacking Dair in the name of Arab independence. The leader was Ramadhan al Shallash of the Mesopotamian League, an extremist political club—as opposition parties were banned and political meetings had to be held in secret, such organizations were referred to as “clubs” in order to deflect suspicion. The petrol depot was blown up, the hospital, church, and offices raided, and ninety people were killed. Meanwhile the majority of the town’s leaders, having invited Shallash and his tribesmen in, found themselves unable to control the killing and looting, and begged Chamier to restore the peace. Chamier, with only twenty men, walked bravely along the main street side by side with the mayor in order to try to calm the population, but was attacked on his return and only survived thanks to the simultaneous arrival of two planes from Baghdad, which strafed the town.

  Shallash was superseded by another member of the League who at once declared Jihad against the British infidel. The border still being in dispute and undecided, orders came from London to withdraw British control closer to Baghdad. The entire area to its north now became a ferment of insurrection and a channel for Iraqi nationalists infiltrating from Syria. Worse still, the retreat of the British convinced the tribesmen of the Shammar and Dulaim that reports of British military weakness had not been exaggerated. Raids on the road between Baghdad and Mosul culminated with the burning of a train. British officers and their staff, four in all, were killed west of Mosul; and had a British column not arrived in the nick of time, Mosul would have been taken and the whole vilayet given over to anarchy.

  The interminable deliberations of the Paris Peace Conference had also thrown the much divided territories of Kurdistan into chaos. The Mesopotamian Kurds did not know whether they would end up under the rule of the French, the Turks, or the British. In an area where each tribe fought its neighbours, the only element of agreement was their rejection of interference of any kind. Some concluded that government by Christians was a worse prospect, because of the likelihood of their retaliating on behalf of the Armenians. At the Peace Conference, pious sentiments had been expressed towards the Armenians and their tragic past. These Christian people, victims of genocide, had suffered under the harsh rule of Russia, Turkey, and Persia ever since the end of the fourteenth century. In the 1890s, the Turks, aided by the Kurds, had initiated a programme of atrocities against them and their growing nationalism. In 1915, having lost against the Russians, the Turks ordered that the Armenians be deported from eastern Anatolia on the grounds that they were “traitors.” If they were not killed before they could leave their homeland, most died of hunger, exhaustion, and disease on the forced marches southwards. Those who died numbered between 300,000 and 1,500,000. The Turks were still powerful and dangerously close, and behind Turkey stood Russia and the Bolsheviks, ready to go to the aid of anyone who fought the accepted order. “We share the blame with France and America for what is happening—I think there has seldom been such a series of hopeless blunders as the West has made about the East since the armistice,” Gertrude wrote.

  In Baghdad, meanwhile, the better-educated younger men began a movement for higher education. As only thirty-three people were currently in secondary education in all of Mesopotamia, their ostensible object was irreproachable. They succeeded in collecting financial support from the wealthy families of the city, and a grant from the Education Department. The new school opened at the beginning of 1920, but after
only four months it had become the headquarters of extreme nationalist parties. Documents were found later showing that the funds had been used to hire assassins to remove prominent figures opposed to their views.

  As anarchy gained ground, order could not be maintained outside the perimeter of the Baghdad defences, and even friendly chiefs warned that they could not answer for their tribesmen unless the British could score some striking success. To the north, on the Diyalah river, the tribes cut railway communications and attacked Baqubah, the British proving unable to protect it from the mob. South of Baghdad, at Shahraban and Kifri, administrative staff were massacred. A train was derailed and the British garrison at Diwaniyah evacuated sixty miles to Hillah by means of lifting the rails from the back of the train and placing them at the front to fill the gaps. The journey to safety of the three thirsty companies of Manchesters took an excruciating eleven days. They collected en route extra engines and carriages on intact sections of the line, and when they pulled into Hillah the train was over a mile long and punctured with bullets from end to end.

  The wilder tribes of southern Iraq had a particular grievance. They had never previously paid taxes, and refused to do so now to the British, just as they had with the Turks. Primitive villagers ruled by warlords, they held grazing land and raised crops under the protection of their chieftain in his defensive tower. Unlike the Turks, the British spent all revenue for the benefit of Iraq. The job of the administration was to raise that revenue come what may, and in the face of opposition from some of his colleagues A.T. gave orders that the towers of the most recalcitrant chieftains were to be bombed. Gertrude had grave reservations about these tactics. She urged A.T. to try to negotiate for tribal cooperation by means of a native committee, but he ignored her pleas. Her memo on the subject had probably been thrown straight into the waste paper basket, she reflected. A.T., frustrated by the liberal sentiments of the mandate and as convinced as ever that the country could be properly run only by direct colonial rule, considered that resistance was inevitable and should be quickly isolated and firmly put down. “The tribes down there are some of the most lawless in Iraq,” Gertrude wrote in July 1920. “. . . They’re rogues, I know . . . But I doubt whether we’ve gone the best way to make them appreciate the benefits of settled government. For months I and others have been telling A.T. that we were pressing them too hard . . .”

  A.T. did not change his position, but in spite of the bombings, the British failed to score a resounding victory in southern Iraq. Opposition to the British spread, with special repercussions for Gertrude, whose early influence, under Sir Percy Cox, had helped persuade the formerly friendly sheikhs to hand in a total of some fifty thousand rifles. Now those very tribes were at a peculiar disadvantage under attack from their neighbours, and had a valid grievance against the British.

  Alarm grew among the citizens of Baghdad. Two distinguished Sunni magnates, one of them an extreme nationalist, called on Gertrude in her office to see if anything could be done to pacify the tribes. The Baghdadi notables, having initiated and escalated the trouble in the south, now found the problem getting out of hand. The mob was destroying property in an area where many of them owned land, blowing up the roads and railways and cutting off supplies. Interestingly, the two magnates did not call on A.T.: his views were too well known and his manner still brusque to the point of rudeness, even with the most distinguished of Arab visitors. To Gertrude they suggested sending a deposition to the divines of Karbala and Najaf, asking them to exert their influence and rein back the tribesmen. She responded that their project would be more effective if they were represented by Sunnis and Shias together, shrewdly reminding them of their recent exhortations on the unity of Islam. With some reluctance they conceded her point. She wrote a summary of the plan, with suggested names, and took it in to A.T. “He was visibly put out and said he could only listen if the matter came to him through Captain Clayton . . . I brought in dear Captain Clayton and he sat there as audience while we finished my scheme . . . A.T. had to climb down.”

  Accumulated British defeats led to further troubles. British installations were being wrecked and communities isolated. By February 1920 she was writing to Florence:

  We are now in the middle of a full-blown Jihad, that is to say we have against us the fiercest prejudices of a people in a primeval state of civilization. Which means that it’s no longer a question of reason . . . We’re near to the collapse of society—the end of the Roman empire is a very close historical parallel . . . The credit of European civilization is gone . . . How can we, who have managed our own affairs so badly, claim to teach others to manage theirs better?

  With the collapse of Arab society seemingly imminent, Gertrude wanted more than ever what she had always wanted: a prosperous and peaceful Arab nation. Even now, she was determined to stay put:

  It’s touch and go—another episode like that of the Manchesters would bring the Tigris tribes out immediately below Bagdad. We are living from hand to mouth . . . We may at any moment be cut off from the universe if the Tigris tribes rise. It doesn’t seem to matter. In fact I don’t mind at all . . .

  Well, if the British evacuate Mesopotamia, I shall stay peacefully here and see what happens.

  Off-the-cuff remarks like this could have aroused A.T.’s suspicions about his political officer’s priorities and allegiances. During the past couple of years, the two of them had engendered an escalating crisis of their own. With A.T. carrying the whole weight of the administration on his admittedly broad shoulders, and “cross as a bear” in consequence, they were bound to clash, particularly in Cox’s absence. Wilson was, after all, doing an impossible job. Implementing government while waiting for the mandate to be declared was a juggling act, and he was trying to run the administration of an entire country with a central staff of five plus fifty-five assistants, in addition to the seventy British officers monitoring the outlying regions. The tribal attacks on roads and railways hampered the movement of troops around the country to where they were needed: principally, to guard the essential installations—the oil terminal, docks, warehouses, and government offices. Moreover, at any one time a high proportion of the sixty thousand troops supposedly at his disposal were on leave deferred from wartime, or in army hospitals suffering from heat exhaustion or malaria. Meanwhile London was constantly reminding him that the insurrection was costing the British taxpayer £2 million a month in military expenditure.

  “Rather a trying week,” was Gertrude’s understatement of events during this period, “for A.T. has been over-worked—a chronic state—and in a condition when he ought not to be working, which results in making him savagely cross and all our lives rather a burden in consequence.”

  Both so rigorous and dynamic, Gertrude and A.T. were poles apart in almost every other respect. He was thirty-four in 1920, and eccentric in a peculiarly British stoical tradition. His father had been headmaster of the empire-oriented Clifton College near Bristol, where he had been educated, so his background was reactionary and chauvinistic. His favourite reading was the Bible, his favourite poet Kipling, his preferred epithets Latin ones. He was built in heroic mould, but his views placed him firmly in the past. Despite the fact that she was all of eighteen years older than him, Gertrude, with her particular intelligence and her whole-hearted dedication to the Arab cause, belonged to the future.

  Nevertheless the conflict between them was not so much personal as professional. A.T. was becoming deeply suspicious of Gertrude’s relations with her numerous important acquaintances both in the West and in the East, and especially of her rapport with the Arab nationalists who opposed his government. She looked among the powerful Iraqi leaders for future representatives and used their own aspirations to forward the constitutional changes she envisaged. He had written to a friend at the India Office, “She will take some handling . . . she is undoubtedly popular in Baghdad among the natives, with whom she keeps in close touch, to her advantage, though it is sometimes dangerous.” He was even, perhaps,
jealous of her influence and intimacy with Arabs in general, for she did not pursue her enquiries only among the VIPs: she continually went out into the countryside, by horse or car, making acquaintance with boat-builders, marsh farmers, fishermen, and villagers, listening and taking in their views. A.T. came to suspect that her work was undermining his. He was constitutionally unable to carry out the day-to-day running of the country while preparing to dismantle British government in favour of an uncertain future. She, by contrast, worked tirelessly outside the conventional limits of her job in her effort to show what needed to be done in readiness for a British-assisted Arab administration. She did not care whether or not it was British imperial practice for political officers to entertain the locals in their own houses, or go to places where women were not supposed to go, or enter into one-on-one conversations with extremists. Against a background of procrastination and its disastrous results, an impasse was reached. “My own feeling is that if, when we set up civil government, we do it on really liberal lines, and not be afraid, we shall have the country with us” . . . “I wish I carried more weight. But the truth is I’m in a minority of one in the Mesopotamian political service—or nearly—and yet I’m sure that I’m right.”