Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  In the ensuing three weeks between sending off her report and receiving the response, Gertrude did a round of socializing by visiting important people in Mesopotamia. She also met many of the dozens of young English women who were allowed into the country to marry their soldier sweethearts, now that the hostilities were over.

  But in the middle of December, during a particularly thunderous downpour, Gertrude arrived at her office, and found a note from A. T. Wilson. She and Wilson hadn’t formed anywhere near the same relationship she had enjoyed with Percy Cox. Indeed, their exchanges swung between cold formality and restrained hostility. During the last years of the war, Wilson had become Cox’s deputy in Mesopotamia. From the very beginning, he had taken an intense dislike to her. He didn’t believe there was any place for women in government service, except as amanuenses, and objected strongly to her using her contacts at the high levels of the British government. He was an odd man, trying to prove he was utterly brilliant academically despite his lack of a university education, sprinkling his reports to India and London with quotations from the greatest of English writers and Greek and Roman philosophers. But he shut her out of the loop in the transmission of his information, making her work as though one of her eyes was permanently closed. She’d sent off the report to Whitehall without showing him, to let him know what it felt like to be left out of the loop.

  Percy Cox was so different to Wilson. Percy was the archetype of the gentleman mentor, but he’d gone to Persia as British Minister, taking charge of the entire country, and had been overruled by Whitehall when the mandarins didn’t take his advice to elevate Gertrude into the job, but instead was forced to leave Wilson in charge of Mesopotamia. She knew he was opening and reading her incoming mail, as well as criticising her to all and sundry, and she knew he’d tried on a number of occasions to have her recalled to London as an incompetent, but his demands had fallen on deaf ears.

  She picked up the note, politely asking her to visit him in his office at her convenience. She knew what it was about, and she was as prepared as she could be. Gertrude steeled herself for the onslaught, walked the corridors from her office upstairs to his suite, and knocked on his door.

  “Ah, Miss Bell. I’m so pleased you’ve found the time to visit me. Thank you for coming.”

  She smiled, and walked over to a chair. She saw a copy of her report on his desk, the one which she’d sent to Balfour. She was surprised it had been returned so quickly.

  Wilson stood from his desk, and walked to the window. He faced the garden, his back to her, and said, “I’ve asked you here because of this unfortunate report you’ve sent to London, a report which should, by rights, have come through me. I wonder if you’d be so good as to explain your actions.”

  Gertrude remained silent. As did Wilson. After an embarrassing lapse of time, he turned, and asked, “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Of course. But I thought you were talking to the window, or someone in the garden. When a gentleman addresses me, I expect to be able to see his face.”

  Tight-lipped, Wilson returned to his desk, and sat down facing her. “Miss Bell, do you have any idea of the damage which your report could do if it got into the wrong hands?”

  “Are you saying the prime minister and the foreign secretary have the wrong hands?”

  “You’re suggesting Britain gives up its interests in Mesopotamia. That it leaves the area in the hands of Arabs and nomads and tribesmen. That we support the elevation of a suitable candidate with money and facilities to become the leader of a pan-Arab nation which you seem to think would partner Great Britain in the development of this new mega-nation’s riches. Have you lost your senses? Are you completely mad?”

  “I’m not in the slightest bit mad, Captain Wilson. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever said anything saner in all my life. To expect the Arabs, in their present mood, to accept suzerainty by a foreign power—”

  “Foreign power?” he shouted. “Foreign power! We are that foreign power, Miss Bell. May I remind you the British fought for this land! We beat the Turks. Thousands of our men died for this wasteland, and you expect us just to give it away. Well, Miss Bell, let me state quite clearly we have no intention of retreating when we have such a wealth of assets at our disposal. To even suggest such a move would, in my opinion, rank as high treason.”

  “Then we will be driven from this land by force, Captain Wilson. I’ve seen the mood of the Arab in the streets. I’ve been to the capital cities and the large towns, and I’ve seen for myself the frame of mind of the people. We’re sitting atop a volcano, and unless we can reach some form of accommodation, it’ll blow us all to kingdom come.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “You really have taken leave of your senses. For five hundred years, the Ottoman has been in charge, for better or for worse. And in all those centuries, while Britons were being shaped by minds such as Shakespeare and Milton and Blake, while we were industrializing and modernizing and inventing new sciences with which to explore the inner workings of the Earth and the movement of the stars, the Arab was sitting under a date tree letting someone else do his thinking. What on Earth, my good woman, makes you think he’s suddenly going to change into a noble savage and rise up in righteous anger to cast off the shackles of imperialism? Eh? He’s lazy, indolent, duplicitous, and utterly untrustworthy. And he’ll cower like a dog when he stares down the barrel of a Lee Enfield.”

  “My God!” she snapped, “You sound just like the wife of an army cook.”

  He stared at her, not understanding the remark. Gertrude stood up and turned from him. She had intended to remain calm through the inevitable tirade, but it was all too much. Trying not to make her voice shake with fury, she said, “Firstly, Captain Wilson, you will alter the tone in which you speak with me. And kindly do not refer to me as your good woman. I hold the honor of being a commander of the British Empire and whether you like me or not, you will respect me for an honor in which I was invested by His Majesty. Secondly, I am the most senior female political officer in the empire, not some typist you can bully by screaming and shouting. Thirdly, I was commissioned directly by the prime minister through the foreign secretary to write my report which I have sent to them directly. If they have sought to include you in their correspondence, then kindly take issue with them, and not with me. And finally, might I remind you that while you’ve been wining and dining in the mess here, I have been onto the street in most Arabic capitals during the past months, so I assure you that I know far more about the mind and intent of the Arab than do you!

  “But that’s the real problem, isn’t it Captain Wilson. Your fury is less with what I said, than because I sent the report to Whitehall, and not through you. Do you wonder why? Because you would have sought to influence me, you and the other members of the general staff here. You believe Great Britain can maintain her interests indefinitely by dint of force. Well, my travels and my enquiries have proven to me without a shadow of a doubt that yours is an untenable position. It will not work, Mr. Wilson, and you will have the blood of many people on your hands if you advise the government otherwise. Had you been with me as I travelled around Arabia listening and observing, Mr. Wilson, instead of sitting in your office drinking cups of tea, I might have more respect for your opinion.”

  She began to walk out of his office, when he said, “Miss Bell, I haven’t dismissed you yet.”

  She turned and glowered at him, “No, but you’ve been trying to do precisely that ever since Percy Cox went to Persia. Do you think I don’t feel the insult of being ignored in the mess, that I don’t know about your correspondences with London concerning how to rid yourself of me, and that I’m not hurt by your snide remarks to the other officers about my relationship with the Arabs? I’m not given to tears, Captain Wilson, and you will never see them in my eyes, no matter how much you try to drive me to them. But I am not somebody you can denigrate without suffering the very grave risk that I will give as good as I get.”

  He looked shocked
. “I’m not trying to make you cry. I just have very grave reservations about your competence. This report,” he said, slapping it with his hand. “It’s monstrous. Are you quite aware of how large Britain’s commercial interests are in Mesopotamia? Half of everything this country imports comes from Great Britain. Not just coal and iron, but clothes, wool, cotton . . . everything. And do you realize Britain imports nearly half of the goods this country produces? Figs, olive oil, dates, grain. But that’s nothing compared to what’s being discovered beneath the sand. Our people estimate there’s enough oil here to supply the British Navy and our new air force, and our entire industry, with enough oil for a thousand years. Look at America. They’re producing nearly 400 million barrels of oil a year, and England’s got none. Not a blessed drop. And now, suddenly, by the grace of God, we could develop wealth beyond anybody’s wildest imagination. And by the grace of Gertrude Bell, the British government is being encouraged to give it all away!”

  He sat down, feeling spent, looking suddenly gaunt and gray. She was too angry and hurt by his remarks to offer him any consolation.

  “I’m not convinced you fully realize the impact of this report and the damage which it could do to British interests. Oil will turn the wheels of industry during the next few centuries. Oil, Miss Bell, of which England has none . . . not coal of which England has much. Persia has a large supply of oil and is under our control. Our boffins believe there’s oil in vast quantities in Mosul in the north, as well as under our very feet in the Tigris and the Euphrates area. If we build a railroad and a pipeline to the Mediterranean, then England’s position as the pre-eminent naval power in the world will be unquestioned. It will lessen our utter dependence on the Suez Canal, the most vulnerable point in our passageway to the East. This will protect India, the jewel in the monarch’s crown.

  “Don’t you see what you’ve done, Miss Bell. By your damnable report, you’ve put at risk all of that. If anyone in the British government acts upon your report, it could be the whole undoing of everything we’ve built over the past two hundred years.”

  She breathed deeply, and said softly to him, “Self-rule for Iraq, for Mesopotamia, is the only route possible to take this nation forward. A partnership in the development of the oil, in purchasing the produce of the country, will work. But the assets of this country must be owned by the Arabs, or the bloodbath I’ve spoken of in my report will surely happen. Whatever happens to Suez and India in the future is something which will happen anyway, oil or no oil, Iraq or no Iraq.”

  She turned back to the door. “I’m sorry we’ve had this disagreement, Captain Wilson, and I have no doubt you’ll send a report to the government asking them to ignore everything I’ve written. That is your right as our senior man in Iraq. But one of us will certainly live to regret the consequences of his or her action . . . and I pray to God it’s not me.”

  She turned to leave his office, but before she walked through the door, Wilson raised his voice again, and told her, “While you and Lawrence were away in Paris, Miss Bell, your reputation grew in Baghdad. Do you know what the Arabs are now calling you? You’re now Umm al Mu’minin, the Mother of the Faithful.”

  She stopped again, and turned to him in shock. He sat at his desk, looking older than when she’d walked in a few minutes earlier. He wore a condescending smile. “Do you know the last person who bore that name, Miss Bell? It was Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Mohammed. Which makes me wonder on which side of the fence you’re sitting. Theirs, or ours?”

  She allowed him his pyrrhic victory and returned to her office, where she burst into tears.

  ~

  The Palace of Westminster, London, England, April, 1920

  The Speaker of the House called for order. The members on the treasury benches were sitting quietly, smirking at the opposition on the other side of the House of Commons. And the members of the opposition were shaking their order papers vigorously, shouting in anger at the government’s attempt to stonewall on such an important issue. Winston Churchill had enlivened the debate, but it was now time for the Speaker to choose somebody from the Labor Party.

  “Order! Order! Honorable members will remain seated, and will come to order. I call on the Honorable, the leader of the Labor Party, Mr. William Anderson.”

  Anderson, a tall, thin Scot, stood in his seat. His side of the House settled down, anticipating verbal pyrotechnics.

  “Mr. Speaker, tonight we have heard, delivered to this Parliament from the mouth of the man entrusted by His Majesty with the governance of the nation, what can only be described as an excuse for an explanation from an excuse for a prime minister . . .”

  His side of the House burst into laughter. The Speaker cautioned him for using un-parliamentary language, and called the House again to order.

  Anderson continued, “Well may the prime minister deal with potential, but we on this side of the House deal in realities. And the reality I’m talking about, Mr. Speaker is the reality of £40 million a year. £40 million, Mr. Speaker, enough to keep His Majesty’s government in pheasant and smoked salmon for a good many months . . .”

  He was interrupted by a roar of laughter and a barrage of here here’s. He continued, “Certainly there appears to be copious quantities of oil beneath the sands of Mesopotamia, but at what cost to the British taxpayer will it be delivered onto our British shores to grease the cogs of our industry? And what benefit will be this cost to the ordinary working man who is the backbone of this country, sleeves rolled up in the mill or choking to death down a coal mine, paying six pence a week in taxation so some Lancashire cotton mill owner or some Sheffield steel millionaire can make more money through enabling his machinery to run more cheaply and more efficiently?”

  Again, his speech was punctuated by here here’s. He turned to his colleagues to signal his approval, and noticed with some satisfaction the prime minister, Mr. Lloyd George was looking increasingly uncomfortable. Anderson held a folder in his hand, a blood-red folder of the type used by the Foreign Office for its ministerial briefings, and Mr. Lloyd George was looking with keen interest at the folder, no doubt wondering precisely what mischievous information, leaked to the opposition by some disgruntled civil servant, it contained. And glancing across at the press gallery, Anderson was equally pleased to notice several reporters had put down their newspapers, and were beginning to take interest in the debate. He wasn’t concerned with the gentleman from The Times, but with the reporters from the Daily Sketch and the Daily Express, who wrote for the constituency which elected him and his colleagues. Next day’s papers would make interesting reading.

  “Mr. Speaker,” he continued, opening his folder and extracting a piece of paper. “The Honorable members might not be aware of the precise commitment which the House has made to stationing troops in foreign lands. I would have thought once the war was over, it was time to bring our lads back. Yes, Mr. Speaker, we have to defend our empire, for that is in our national interests, but there has to be a balance between the money we spend on maintaining our overseas colonies, and the value of those colonies to the working class man.

  “Stationing so many men abroad is costing this nation a fortune. It has already cost us untold misery in the millions of wonderful and brave young men we’ve lost on foreign fields, but today, Mr. Speaker, we have seventeen thousand British and forty-four thousand Indian troops in Mesopotamia.”

  This time he was interrupted by shouts of shame. He continued, “And if we add these sixty thousand expensive young men, plus their commanders and all the claret they can drink to the twenty-three thousand troops we’ve got stationed in Palestine, we’re looking at nearly £40 million a year to keep our garrisons in place.

  “Mr. Speaker, no man in this Parliament could deny the value of Mesopotamia to the future of Great Britain. They are inextricably linked. But surely, with Britain sitting on a thousand years of coal reserves, and with oil not yet proven as a fuel to equal the majesty of our own black gold, and with the very real prospect of damagi
ng the livelihoods of our own coal miners, we should be far more circumspect in our funding to keep these warring factions of Arabs apart.”

  He closed the folder, and sat down to the cheers and approbation of his side. Those behind him slapped him on the back, and from the look on Mr. Lloyd George’s face, he knew he’d done some damage. The question was, would the prime minister release the attack dogs in the form of William Ormsby-Gore and Winston Churchill, who could demolish logic with a brilliantly turned phrase, or would he rise to the occasion himself.

  With some satisfaction, Anderson noticed the Prime minister indicated to the Speaker he wished to refute the argument himself. As the old Welshman stood, the House came to order.

  “Mr. Speaker, I wonder what the Honorable member would say if we were to wander together through the wheat fields of Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire on a sunny day, and gaze across at an acre here, or an acre there of nodding grain about to be harvested. I wonder if he’d say to me that England could be so much greater, could feed herself better, if we had more land.”