Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  In Arabic, he said, “I’m so sorry to bother you, but could I possibly have a quick word to Miss Gertrude—Good Lord.”

  Lawrence spotted Prince Faisal sitting on a sofa near to the window.

  “Highness,” he said from the corridor, bowing.

  The prince said urgently to his servant, “Don’t allow the gentleman to remain outside in the corridor. Bring him inside immediately before he makes a fuss.”

  Lawrence was pulled into the room by the guard, and summed up the scenario in seconds.

  “This really is too bad, Lawrence. How dare you commit such a breach of etiquette?” she hissed at him.

  “I’m sorry, Gertie, but I simply returned to inform you that there’s a game of bridge after dinner. I had no idea you were with royalty.” He turned to address the prince, “Your Highness, this humble servant of the English king greets you and begs you to know that I am honored to be in your illustrious presence.”

  “How do you know me?” asked the prince, still startled at being recognized. And then he realized. “Oh yes, the damned photos in your British magazines when I was in Zermatt skiing last year.”

  Lawrence nodded. Too late for remedy, Gertrude said, “May I be permitted to introduce you to a colleague of mine. This unworthy and disgraceful man is Captain Thomas Lawrence, who should know better than to do what he did. However, more than any Englishman I’ve ever known before, Captain Lawrence is Arabia. For all his faults, Your Highness, Mr. Lawrence is a man of the desert. Although he is English, there is sand in his blood. While I might have been of assistance to you, sir, between the two of us, I’m sure we can answer your needs, without the English generals or the Prime minister needing to know of your visit. Mr. Lawrence and I are very good friends, and we work closely together for the British Intelligence Service. I can vouch for his knowledge, and I will ensure his discretion.”

  Too late for him to do otherwise, the prince gave his assent, and it took Gertrude only a matter of minutes to brief Lawrence on why he had come to Egypt to seek out Gertrude.

  With a bow, Lawrence said, “Highness, it is a privilege of the highest order to be called upon to assist you in this urgent matter.”

  “You are a flatterer, Mr. Lawrence. We should always beware of flattery. We are told that flattery looks like friendship, just like a wolf looks like a dog.”

  Lawrence laughed; the prince was bemused by his high-pitched, girlish giggle. The Englishman said, “If I may be permitted to respond, sir, one of the greatest writers in the English language, Jonathan Swift, wrote a wonderful and amusing poem. If my memory serves me right, it goes

  It is a maxim in the schools,

  That flattery is the food of fools;

  Yet now and then your men of wit,

  Will condescend to take a bit.

  “Therefore, Highness, I treat Your Majesty not as a fool, but as a man of wit.”

  Gertrude looked at Lawrence in astonishment. Was he going too far? His impertinence could imperil the situation! But the prince burst out laughing, and said, “You are good with words, Captain Lawrence. A thousand years before the renaissance of your Queen Elizabeth the First, when you English were still grovelling around in the mud and wearing blue paint on your skin, we people of the desert were writing the finest poetry and dealing with the most complex mathematics man had studied since the time of the Greeks.”

  “And will again, Prince Faisal,” Gertrude told him. “You were once a great people, living in great cities. In Damascus and Baghdad, you made the desert bloom and you excited the world with the most breathtaking of dreams. Your nights were lit by street lamps while the English were scurrying around like rats in the dark, and your astronomers were lighting up minds with their mapping of the skies. And yet, Prince Faisal, you have allowed yourselves to become the slaves of barbarians and like the slaves of Africa who worked on the tobacco and cotton plantations of America, you are shackled and your impoverished dreams are no longer the dreams of free men. You need a great man to rise up and unite your people.”

  “Gertie!” Lawrence hissed. “How dare you speak to His Highness in that way? This is gross impertinence.”

  “It is the truth, Mr. Lawrence,” said the prince. “However uncomfortable it might be for me to hear, Miss Bell is merely telling us all the reality of our situation. If I wanted to deal in flattery, I might as well present myself at the Topkapi Palace of the Sultan in Constantinople, for he would tell me how important I and my people are to the future of Arabism and Islam. And the Turks, once they had their agreement, would continue to treat us like slaves. I came here because my people need to face the urgent reality of the modern world, and they look to their leaders to guide them. Which is why I and my father who lead the people of the Kingdom of the Hejaz, the very home of the Prophet himself, peace and blessings upon him, look to you both for your advice. For I know I will hear from Miss Bell, the Daughter of the Desert, and now from her friend, Mr. Lawrence, a friend of Arabia, words I can trust when my father and I make our decisions.”

  Lawrence sat down, and told the servant to fetch him a glass of rose water, which he did immediately. It was a gesture noticed with annoyance by Gertrude. She had spent half her life traveling in the most masculine-dominated place imaginable, in the homes and palaces and tents of rulers where she was treated with respect. Yet earlier, when she had asked for a glass of water, the servant had looked to his master for permission before acquiescing to her wishes. It was so typical of the chauvinism of Arabic society, but it was an irritation which she would have to bite back.

  “So,” said the Prince, “now you know my position, what should I advise my father the king to do? Side with the Turks, and defer the assault by ibn Sa’ud at least until this war is ended, which might not be until next year, or side with you British and incur not just the wrath of the Turks, but also of his brother Sheiks who see Great Britain as just another colonial master?”

  “Your Highness already knows the answer,” said Gertrude. “Your father’s only option is to be part of the British assault against the Turks. The Ottoman Empire is on the point of collapse. This war is a preposterous adventure, a moment of triumphalism, merely the last hurrah. Your people must be part of the winning side, or in the peace which inevitably follows, you will be crushed by empires whose size Your Highness cannot imagine. France and Great Britain alone could carve up the Middle East and if you had fought them as their enemy your father, his sons, and their children’s children will long remember the time when you could have been great, if only . . .”

  “So you think the Turkish Empire is on the verge of collapse, do you, Miss Bell. Then what was Gallipoli.”

  “Gallipoli was a miscalculation by the War Office, sir,” she said.

  “A miscalculation which cost the lives of tens of thousands of young British and Australian men, I think.”

  “Errors always happen in the heat of battle,” said Gertrude. “In wartime, decisions are made without possession of all the facts. How, for instance, were we to know that the Turks was waiting for our lads in the hills and that they’d be mown down like dogs? And how does your Highness know that by joining with ibn Sa’ud to fight us, he won’t suddenly turn on you in the heat of battle? The fact of the matter is, Prince Faisal, that while Great Britain is undoubtedly imperial, and looks towards spreading its empire into new lands and new continents, we will do so in partnership with local rulers. The days of Victoria, Empress of India, are long gone. A close relationship with Great Britain will afford you security and independence. And from that independence, sir, I feel certain a leader will emerge who can, who will, create a great Arab nation, not just a collection of small tribes all feuding with each other.”

  The prince smiled and shook his head. “If anybody should be the leader of all the Arab people, Sunni and Shi’ite and all the rest, then it is my father, for he is guardian of the holiest sites of Islam. But we are a tribal people, Miss Bell, and tribes by their very nature will always fight and squabble. I was t
old this by your Sir Alistair.”

  “I hate to disagree with Sir Alistair, but if you think back almost a thousand years, things were different under Saladin,” she said.

  “True, but a man such as Saladin arises only once in a thousand years,” said the prince.

  “So now is the time for another Saladin to arise. This is your moment, Majesty. You and your people are ready for such a man.”

  “My father is no Saladin. He is cautious, worried, and elderly.”

  “But Saladin wasn’t an Arab, Highness,” she said quietly, barely daring to utter the words. “Those such as your revered father and ibn Sa’ud and ibn Rashid are not men who the leaders of other Arab tribes will follow. They carry too much baggage. Perhaps you need somebody from beyond the Arab people . . .”

  Thomas Lawrence looked at her again in astonishment. This presumptuousness was as close to treason as anything he’d ever heard. She was talking as though she were the Prime minister of England. “Gertie dearest, while this is a very private conversation for the prince’s benefit, I would urge you to remember that you’re a servant of the British Crown. You aren’t entitled to talk to his Highness about such issues as leadership and especially not about partnerships or such like.”

  “On the contrary, Thomas,” she said, sipping her rose water. The prince looked on in bemusement as a quarrel began to develop between them. “If the Arabs are ever to be a great nation again, they must learn to come together as one people under a wise and fatherly ruler, and not as underdogs to some empire from over the sea, be that empire Turkish or British. Arabic history—”

  “Never mind about Arabic history. You’re a serving British official, and this disloyalty does you no credit.” he said sternly.

  “But what does you both great credit is your painful honesty,” said the prince. “From what I have heard, you both wish the same—that Britain’s interests and the interests of Arabia must be as one. This is what I came to hear. I am not so naïve as to think that supporting Britain to conquer the Turks will result in Britons returning to their home once the war is over. Mr. Churchill talks in the corridors of Whitehall about the need for oil to run the nation’s ships and his factories. He is young, but far from naïve. He will, I’m sure, persuade the rest of the British Cabinet to his point of view. The oil from Persia is all well and good, but another supply in Arabia will be better. Two oil supplies are more secure than one. So after this war is over, we will entertain a partnership with Great Britain in oil and other mutual interests.

  “I shall now return to my home, and advise my father that he should negotiate the signing of a treaty in which we of the Kingdom of the Hejaz will fight alongside our British friends, and that a part of the negotiations of that treaty with Great Britain will be an undertaking to protect us from our brothers who might seek to destroy us when this war is over. I thank you both for clarifying the issue. It was as I thought, but I needed to hear it from you. Now I need your joint assistance on the way in which I should frame the argument which will persuade my father to do so.”

  ~

  Cairo, Egypt, November, 1915

  Sir Henry McMahon’s home in Cairo was a former Ottoman palace, large, airy, and ornate. His wife detested it with a vengeance, telling her friends she’d rather live in a Wimbledon two-up two-down bungalow than in the middle of a wedding cake. But as the British government’s resident in Egypt, his standing determined the home in which he and his wife would live until they could return to their country estate in verdant England.

  A passionate ex-smoker, Sir Henry was becoming increasingly irritated by the fact that the woman sitting opposite him in the second withdrawing room of his private apartments—one of the few places in the palace where there was no possibility of his servants overhearing any conversations—was puffing like a train on one cigarette after another.

  “Shall we go for a walk in the garden?” Sir Henry suggested pointedly to Gertrude and Captain Lawrence. “It’s such a beautiful day, and I feel the need for some fresh air.”

  They walked in studied silence through the labyrinthine corridors of the palace until they left through the rear and entered the delicately constructed gardens full of scented trees and flamboyant bushes. They meandered along and around the pathways until they came to the central fountain which was surrounded by marble tables and stone benches. They sat, and Sir Henry breathed the air deeply to clear the fumes from Gertrude’s cigarettes out of his lungs.

  “Let’s recap for a moment, shall we, so we’re all in complete understanding of the picture,” he said. “You know I’ve been in regular correspondence with the Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz about rising up against the Turks, yet you insist that I now send over another delegation to offer him support against ibn Sa’ud. And with them I send a lot of money to assist him in convincing his people to side with us?”

  “Yes,” said Gertrude.

  “But you also insist at the same time as I’m paying those in the Hejaz, that I negotiate with ibn Sa’ud and offer him another lot of money to ensure that he joins with us against the Turks?”

  “Yes,” said Lawrence.

  “And yet you both know that the Turks are putting a fortune into ibn Sa’ud’s pocket.”

  “Yes,” they both said at once.

  “Isn’t that rather a lot of money to gamble with? I mean what if they pocket the money and stay out of the war. They both know the Turks are intent on attacking the Suez Canal and expelling us from Egypt. Surely these Arabians would be better off waiting six months and determining which way the wind blew . . . wouldn’t they?” asked Sir Henry.

  “No,” insisted Gertrude. “That’s not the way they think. Look Henry, it’s vital that the Arabs revolt against the Turks, or we’re in real trouble.”

  Sir Henry looked at her in amazement. “Have you forgotten that the British Army from India has taken the city of Basrah on the Gulf from the Turks and is, as we speak, fighting its way northwards towards Baghdad. The way our lads are going, I’m not all that sure we’re going to need the help of the Arabs. I really think you might have underestimated the ability of our lads in khaki, and overestimated the fighting skills of the tribesmen. I know them, Gertie, and they’re an undisciplined lot. Most of the buggers are nothing short of cutthroat villains who’d take money one day and stab you in the back the next. So what makes you think that even if they do side with us, we’ll be able to turn them into an army?

  “Sir Henry,” interrupted Lawrence, “the Arabs won’t ever be a spit and polish army marching four square in ranks. Desert warfare is an entirely different thing. It’s hit and run and hiding behind sand dunes and attacking the enemy when he’s bedded down for the night. Nobody has written a manual for desert warfare, yet warfare in the desert has been conducted for millennia. Think about how Mohammed and his followers managed to take a rag-tag group of tribesmen and conquer all of Arabia, all of North Africa and then cross into Europe, taking Spain and damn near the rest of Western Civilization. And there are no fighting men in the world who can fight in the desert better than the Arab.”

  Henry McMahon looked in distaste at Lawrence. He’d taken an instant dislike to him, viewing the young man as effete and pompous, yet he was accorded both prominence and respect by the redoubtable Gertrude Bell, whom Sir Henry knew well from London, and who’s reputation as a woman of knowledge and wisdom meant that if she respected this Lawrence person, then of necessity, so must he.

  “Be that as it may, Lawrence, I still think you’re overestimating the importance of this Arab army you’re talking about.”

  “No he’s not, Henry,” said Gertrude. “You underestimate both the Arab and the Turks at your own risk. The latest intelligence is that our boys are doing well despite the marshes and the lack of roads, but that the Turks have massive forces in Baghdad, and are just waiting for the British army to get within firing range. Then all hell will break loose,” Gertrude said, her voice vehement and strident.

  “That’s as may be, but you have
to understand the political realities.” Sir Henry took a sip of water, and continued, “The big brass in India have overtaken responsibility for Persia and Mesopotamia and all the land between Palestine and Turkey. We, in the Arab Office, have been given Egypt and Africa and the Sudan by our Lords and Masters in London. That’s what we have to deal with, I’m afraid. Decisions made about Arabia and Palestine and Syria are those of Lord Hardinge in the Sub-Continent, as well as the Foreign Office, and the Viceroy of India himself isn’t in favor of an Arab revolt. He thinks it’s a dangerous thing, and it’ll just lead to the creation of a whole bevy of independent Arab kingdoms in Mesopotamia and Syria and elsewhere and British interests will go to pot.”

  Captain Lawrence laughed. “Our noble Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.”

  Sir Henry McMahon bridled at the impertinence of the young man. “May I remind you, Captain Lawrence, that Charles Hardinge is a friend of mine, and was nearly assassinated in the service of the British Crown. He deserves more respect, if you don’t mind.”

  “I apologize, Sir Henry,” the young man said quickly, especially as Gertrude had given him one of her looks, a raised right eyebrow which told him he’d gone much too far.

  Sir Henry continued, “You might not fully appreciate the problem which Lord Hardinge faces. It’s an unquestionable fact that Great Britain’s empire currently encompasses a vast number of Muslims. India has tens of millions of Sunni Muslims who look towards the Sultan of Turkey as their spiritual leader. Hardinge is terrified that the non-Arab Muslims of India will never accept it if Great Britain supports an Arabic revolt against the Turks. So after winning Basrah, he’s pushing northward towards Baghdad, and . . .”

  “Pushing northwards recklessly, Sir Henry,” said Lawrence. “That’s the problem. We in the Arab Bureau know the difficulties our poor blighters are going to face. Lord Hardinge is in India, and has no idea of the terrain or of the numbers of Turks on the ground which face him. There are almost no lines of communication between Cairo and Delhi, just the occasional terse and intemperate telegram. He has no understanding of which side the Arabs will decide to fight for. I’m sorry, sir, but right now, Hardinge is doing all of this on his own for King and Country, but . . .”