Bell of the Desert
Page 13
She looked at Dowling, but by his attitude, she knew her words were falling on deaf ears. She became annoyed at his patronizing manner and his supercilious smile.
“Look, General, there are lots of people here in England who can draw maps and make assessments, but I would venture to say that nobody has the experience or knowledge of Arabs that I have. No, General, I need to be in Cairo, or Baghdad, or Damascus to be of real use. I insist that the British government send me out there.”
The general shook his head in amazement. “Send a woman to a sector where there are hostilities? Are you insane? There’s no possibility whatsoever of that happening. I’m not sending you into the front lines. The area’s far too dangerous.”
“That’s ridiculous. Nurses like Florence Nightingale were in a battle zone in the Crimea. Stop thinking of me as a woman, General, I’m an expert in Arab affairs. You’re being negligent in your duties if you don’t send me.”
Lawrence looked at her in astonishment. Nobody spoke to a general like that. But Dowling merely shook his head, and said softly, “You’re not going. Sorry, Miss Bell, but women don’t serve at the front.”
“I see,” she said. “Perhaps if I was to go and speak to the foreign secretary . . .”
“You’ll be given the same answer. He and I have spoken about you at some length, and we’re both of the opinion that you’re of more use, and much safer in England.”
Thomas Lawrence unexpectedly spoke, “General, if I may be permitted. I’ve worked with Miss Bell in Mesopotamia. I’ve seen her interactions with the desert tribes. She’s extraordinary. She speaks Persian and Arabic fluently . . . she’s done one of the best translations of Persian poetry ever. She’s written wonderful books about her adventures in the desert. She’s an explorer, an adventurer, an archaeologist, and a linguist. She’s—”
“Lieutenant Lawrence,” the general said sternly. “My decisions are not to be questioned, and certainly not by a junior officer. Now, kindly take Miss Bell to your office, and show her what you’re doing, so she can assist you.”
The general looked at Gertrude, and said simply, “Maps, Miss Bell. That’s where you’ll be of most use to Great Britain. Maps.”
Then he sat down at his desk, and started signing papers. They left the general’s office in silence.
“Damn him,” she hissed once they were in the corridor. “Pompous arse of a man. I’ll go above his head and speak directly to the Prime minister. Don’t you see, Thomas, I have to be in Cairo or Alexandria. I have to get back into the desert to speak to the tribal leaders. There’s not a minute to lose.”
“Gertie, this war has only just begun. People are saying it won’t last beyond Christmas, but my guts tell me that it’s going to be long and drawn-out and bloody. If you rush things, it’ll just rebound in your face. Look, I know it’s frustrating, but stay with me for a while, work with me in Intelligence, and we’ll do something useful. And we’ll have a pretty good time to boot. I’ll take you to the theatre and we’ll go to one of the motion pictures? Just wait it out for a bit, and when the generals have made a pig’s ear out of their negotiations with the Arabs, you can ride in on a big camel and save the day.”
She smiled. They walked along the corridors and down the stairs towards the bowels of the building. But as they descended deeper and deeper, Gertrude wondered whether there would be a day left for her to save.
The room which he occupied was the diametric opposite of the general’s suite of offices on the uppermost floor of the Staff Headquarters. Lawrence was stationed at a small rickety wooden desk, one of a dozen such desks which surrounded a massive central table in the basement of the Headquarters building. The room was window-less, airless, and gloomy, even with electric lighting shining in the middle of the day. Yet despite the conditions, it was frantic with activity, all centered around books and old maps and intelligence assessments, mounds of reports, and sheafs of papers.
The huge map table in the center of the room was covered with large rectangles of cloth-backed paper, all glued carefully together to appear joint-less. Gertrude recognized it instantly as the land through which flowed the Tigris and the Euphrates. To the left was the barren Nefud Desert. Northwest was Syria, northeast Persia, and south were the great deserts of Arabia. But what captured her eye were the two great rivers of Arabia, both sourced within a couple of hundred miles of each other in the snowy mountains of Asiatic Turkey. Both of them flowed southwards to the Persian Gulf, nearly meeting at the place when the ancients of the Abbasid dynasty had built their capital, Baghdad, on the sparkling waters of the River Tigris.
All over the map, from Mosul in the north to Basrah close to the Gulf, were pins and small flags and markers which gave what the cartographers believed were the dispositions of the Arabic tribes and geographical formations such as mountains, rivers and valleys. It took merely one glance to show Gertrude that the mapmakers were hopelessly inaccurate in their demographic data.
Before he could introduce her to the others, she scrutinized the map, and asked of one of the orderlies, “Why is the flag labelled Anazzah on the eastern side of the Tigris and just to the north of Al Amarah?”
The hapless man looked at her in astonishment. Not knowing who she was—she could have been a well-dressed char lady as far as he was concerned—he replied peremptorily, “Because that’s where they are.”
Others in the room looked up to see the diminutive Lawrence in the company of a tall, fashionably dressed middle-aged lady. But more than being interested in her clothes, they were listening intently to what she was saying.
Gertrude walked over to the map, and said, “That’s not where the Anazzeh are to be found. Their traditional land is the western border of the Euphrates. You’ve placed them close to the territory of the Marsh Arabs.”
Now everyone else in the room looked up from their maps and pieces of paper to listen to the incident. One stood, and walked officiously over to the map table.
“I gave him instructions to place it there. They’re nomads, madam, and the location on the map is based on latest intelligence from our sources. And who the dickens are you to tell me where to place a flag?”
Gertrude bridled at his arrogance, but decided to restrain herself. “Might I respectfully suggest that your intelligence is inaccurate? The Anazzeh are nowhere near the location you’ve been given.”
“And you’ll forgive me, madam, but that really is no concern of yours. Our intelligence is a mere week old, and that’s where the Anazzeh live,” he said, pointing to the spot near to the Gulf.’
“No it’s not. It’s totally inaccurate. Just last year, I was in their tents. I lived with them for a week. I befriended the latest wife of their leader Fahad Bey. I tell you, sir, that your position is inaccurate.”
“And I tell you, madam, that it’s not.”
Furious, Gertrude said, “The Anazzeh are Sunni Arabs. You’ve got them within a day’s march of the Marsh Arabs at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Marsh Arabs are Shi’ite. They hate each other, each calling the other apostate, and if they were as close as you’ve got them now, there would be war, and one of them would be wiped out. You really don’t understand the culture or the people, let alone the geography, gentlemen.”
She looked carefully at the other flags giving the disposition of the Arab tribes of Mesopotamia.
“These other tribes are hundreds of miles from where they should be. This is just too bad,” she said, picking up a long wooden pole, and beginning to shift the positions of the flags.
“Look here, you can’t do that. Who the deuce are you? Damn it, Lawrence, did you bring this woman in here? What’s she doing? This is a war room.”
Lawrence looked uncomfortable, but Gertrude wasn’t in any mood to banter. The arrogance of the captain dismissing her intimate knowledge had made her mad. “My God, all of this is grossly incorrect. The whole map will have to be re-drawn. It’s woefully wrong. You have desert where there’s arable land, mountains w
here there are plains and you’ve got flowing rivers which haven’t run for a millennium. What idiot constructed this, anyway?”
By now, all the cartographers and intelligence officers had left their desks to defend their work against the assault of the unknown woman and walked towards the central mapping table. As one, they joined their colleague in decrying her arrogance and presumption.
Before Lawrence could jump to her defense, Gertrude looked at all the irritated men gathered before her, and held up her hand for silence.
“Be quiet! All of you! Answer me this . . . has anybody here been to the Arabian desert?” Nobody answered.
“Has anybody been to Baghdad or Mesopotamia at all?” Again silence.
“Has anybody been out of England?”
They all began to argue with her, until one man’s voice rose above the others, “We don’t have to go there to be able to draw a map. We’re not explorers, you know. We’re bally intelligence officers, and we rely on our men out there for the information which we piece together. That’s how you make maps, in case you hadn’t realized it. What the bloody hell gives you the right to just come in here and tell us how to do our work, anyway?”
Lieutenant Lawrence shouted over the hubbub, “Gentlemen, this is Miss Gertrude Bell. Miss Bell has traveled for years through the entire area of the Middle East. She knows the towns, the cities, and the people like she knows the back of her hand. The foreign secretary invited her to speak with General Dowling, and Miss Bell has kindly consented to assist us with mapmaking and intelligence work. Miss Bell was the recipient of this year’s Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal.”
Not one of the other officers had heard of Gertrude, and their faces showed they weren’t impressed by what he had said.
“Frankly, Lawrence,” one of them told him, “I don’t give a tuppenny worth of tar who this lady is, or what bally medal she’s won. But for her to come in here and start criticizing months of painstaking work is just too . . .”
“Oh don’t be so stupid,” Gertrude snapped. “When it’s finished and printed, this map will be the basis for British troop movements and disposition. Thousands of British service men will be using it to determine lines of communication and for the purposes of military maneuvering. What if they make decisions based on a map which is hopelessly inaccurate? What if they travel fifty miles eastwards to meet up with Sheik Fahad Bey ibn Hadhdhal of the Anazzeh and instead, thanks to your map, they come over a hill and find themselves face to face with the Rwallah or the Juheina or the Harb or the Billi or the Beni Sakhr, any of whom could side with the Turks tomorrow? Where are those tribes on your map, gentlemen? They’re not, because you’ve never even heard of them. Yet between them, they can provide a million fighting men against the Turks if we negotiate the right price. One of our most pressing strategic objectives in the coming engagement is that the Arabs rise up on the side of Great Britain, yet you have no idea who they are, or to whom they’re currently loyal, or their current positions. One million men unaccounted for, gentlemen. That’s enough to win the coming war in the Middle East and protect British interests, or, if we can’t find them, to allow them to join the Turks and inflict upon us the greatest losses ever suffered by the British Army. Yet your intelligence sources haven’t deigned to supply you with the details of their existence for your map?
“Now, instead of complaining about my criticism of your months of painstaking and useless work, let’s start doing things properly, shall we?”
She forced an alleyway through the cluster of fuming officers, took off her coat, and claimed an empty rickety desk near to the map table. It was going to be a very long couple of months.
~
The Royal City of Jeddah,
Port City of the Kingdom of the Hejaz, July 1914
He read, and then re-read the advisory note from the British Foreign Office about how he should conduct this interview, what the Arabs might require, and the maximum which should be offered. He was glad the person who’d written it, some female called Gertrude Bell, hadn’t used the sort of Whitehall diplomatic jibber jabber which was too cautious and ambivalent to state an opinion, and said ridiculously unhelpful things like “on the one hand . . . but then on the other hand . . .”
Instead, her report was precise, focussed, direct, and perceptive, not only giving him the background to the people whom he’d be meeting, but instructing him on their strengths to circumvent and the weaknesses he could play on. He didn’t know who she was, but this Bell woman had made his life much easier for a task in which he felt unprepared and unqualified. Negotiations weren’t his strong point. He was a man of dedicated action, a man more comfortable leading an army rather than parlaying with kings and princes, but he’d been given the job of delivering news, and deliver it he would.
Dressed in his crisp white dress uniform, beribboned and bemedalled, General of the British Army and unwilling Diplomat Plenipotentiary, Sir Alistair Waverley Booth walked stiffly behind the slow-moving servant of Sharif Hussein bin-Ali of Mecca, the King of the Hejaz. The general’s footsteps, which normally echoed off the walls wherever he walked, were today uncharacteristically silent. Whenever he entered a mosque or a palace, he found walking in his stocking feet difficult and unusual.
The building was only an average Arabian palace, unspectacular in design and ordinary in execution compared to other Arabian bastions he’d been in. This one had no more than twenty or thirty rooms, and must have been erected in the seventeenth or eighteenth century by some wealthy merchant. Alternatively, it could have been built more recently by some distance cousin of the Hashemite ruling family, someone who lived in Jeddah because he wasn’t of sufficient prestige to build a palace in the holy cities of Mecca or Medina.
Yet like other edifices in this extraordinary part of the world, this palace was a masterpiece of Arabic ingenuity. In the cornices between every ceiling and wall was an inscription in flowing Arabic writing from the Koran. Ceramic tiles and the marble floor kept the rooms cool from the fierce heat of the outside world, and the coolness was enhanced by fountains of playful water in every room. But what most impressed Sir Alistair was the way in which the lattices in the upper parts of all the rooms concealed hidden mezzanine corridors and suspended galleries and spy holes which enabled a thousand curious eyes to see and hear what was happening on the floor below.
As he walked through the rooms to the central part of the palace where Sharif Hussein was waiting, he was impressed by its lightness of weight, as though the entire construction was made of sugar and cream to form a wondrous meringue. It was remarkable that such a large building could seem somehow so flimsy, and yet at the same time portray such solidity.
Booth understood very well why the Sharif Hussein bin-Ali insisted on this meeting in Jeddah. As a Christian, he wasn’t allowed to set foot in Mecca, or there’d be a riot. And as a descendant of the Prophet, the custodian of the Ka’aba, Islam’s most holy shrine, Hussein could not possibly be seen meeting an infidel on such holy land.
But there were other, altogether more devious reasons for this meeting being held in the port city on the shores of the Red Sea. The Sharif knew better than anybody that Abd al Aziz, the leader of the Sa’ud family of the lands in the eastern part of Arabia, a murderous warlord who was in bed with the Ottoman Turks, had spies everywhere in the eastern kingdom of Hejaz, and this was a conversation which must be kept top secret. The other reason was that Jeddah was one the few places left in the Hejaz kingdom where the fanatical followers of the Wahhabist Islamic sect hadn’t yet gained a particularly strong footing.
One room of the palace flowed into another, each decorated in distinctly different color to signify their usage—rose rooms for the women to gather, rooms with dark brown cushions for the men to use after they had eaten, others with blue furnishings and cushions and drapes on the walls for use when the men had returned from a sea voyage and needed to rest before seeing their wives. Each room was a masterpiece of design and sensibility.
On another couch sat Faisal, third son of the sharif. Sir Alistair was surprised Faisal was permitted in the room. He’d rather expected that he would be greeting by the Sharif’s advisors, and at the very least Faisal’s elder brother Abdullah. He knew little about Faisal, other than he’d been educated in Constantinople, and was, according to the note written by this Gertrude Bell woman, an intelligent young man.
Sir Alistair stepped forward, removed his plumed helmet and bowed in respect to the king. While still abasing himself, he placed the fingers on his right hand on his forehead, then he kissed them, and then he rested them on his heart in the traditional Arabic greeting.
“Good morning, Sir Alistair. I don’t know whether or not you’ve met my third son, His Highness Prince Faisal? I think you’ve met my son Abdullah, but not Faisal, is that correct?”
The Englishman nodded and looked at Faisal. The young man, who couldn’t have been older than his late twenties, stood and walked over to the representative of Great Britain. Faisal was tall and slender, and hardly looked robust, but when he shook hands, Sir Alistair noted that his grip was firm and masculine. But by the look of him, Sir Alistair thought he could use a couple of boxing lessons. It was almost as though he’d been a strange and sickly child who had somehow come through, but suffered from the effects of youthful malnutrition or disease. He was slightly built and somewhat effeminate looking, but there was an unmistakable inner strength. He looked like an interesting young man, somebody possibly worth cultivating. Bell’s advisory had mentioned this Faisal chappie as a person of interest to be noted, but even though he’d read her notes before entering the Palace, Sir Alistair couldn’t for the life of him remember whether she’d said he was a force in the family, or just some hanger-on, like so many of the other minor princes and princesses in the Arabian Gilbert and Sullivan dynasties.