Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  “We have a situation which has occurred, and I need your advice, Miss Bell,” he said without according her the usual greeting. “I’m aware you and I are in a serious and irreparable conflict, but this is an issue from which we both will suffer if it remains unresolved, and so two heads are better than one.”

  She looked at him in disgust, but it was so unusual to be sitting in his office these days she decided to remain silent.

  “The fact is, despite the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves, when it’s quite possible there’ll be outright full-scale war between Britain and the local tribesman, General Haldane has decided now is an appropriate moment to take his entire High Command on holiday to Persia.”

  Gertrude burst out laughing, but suddenly realized she was the only one who found the remark witty. The blood drained from her face when she understood Wilson was being totally serious.

  Wilson continued, “He’s due for leave, apparently, and so are many of his senior officers, and so he’s taking them for some recreation time in Teheran. I have forbidden him to leave because of the desperate urgency of the situation, but he says he isn’t answerable to me, and he and his officers’ leave was granted by the War Office three months ago. He can see no reason whatsoever to defer or cancel his leave, and he intends to leave immediately. His mind is made up, and he appears to be quite content to leave the situation we find ourselves in at the present moment in the hands of his junior officers. He informs me he isn’t intent upon returning here for three months. It’s unbelievable.”

  She could hardly speak. “But—”

  “I know. I can barely bring myself to look at the idiot. To leave us now, to leave his tens of thousands of men without a senior commander . . . it’s . . .”

  “But what did he say?” she asked. She was simply too flabbergasted to think clearly.

  “He said he didn’t feel any responsibility for what happened here while he was away. He said if the situation worsens, then his junior officers will benefit from the experience of making their own decisions. He also informs me he’s quite willing for me to order the deployment of his troops. It’s not just monstrous, it’s the most unprecedented dereliction of duty I think I’ve ever encountered.”

  “How dare he?” she said. “What kind of a military officer would do such a thing? The man needs to be brought to book. He has to be censured in the very highest tribunal of England. I’ll make him suffer in the House of Commons or the House of Lords. I’ll have my friends in government ask questions, and that’ll force the War Office to do something about it.”

  Wilson nodded. “I have to say I’ve always objected to your contacting your many friends in high places, but on this occasion, you do so with my blessing. The higher, the better. Do you happen to know the king?”

  “Not personally, but I know somebody who under these circumstances will be of much greater value to us than the king. I’m thinking of writing to Winston Churchill.”

  Wilson suddenly beamed a smile. “I don’t have much time for Mr. Churchill, but yes, if anybody can pillory this idiot and make things happen, one couldn’t do better than having him on our side.”

  She stood and nodded to him. “Don’t worry, Captain Wilson, I’ll send a cable to Winston. That’ll bring the wayward general back here in no time.”

  He called her back, “Before you go, Miss Bell, this incident at Tel Mahmood . . . it had to happen, you know. I couldn’t allow the murder of six Englishmen to go unpunished.”

  “No, of course you couldn’t, Captain Wilson. Murderers must be punished. But maybe these poor souls wouldn’t have been murdered in the first place if you hadn’t adopted such a vigorous attitude towards the question of nationalism. It’s British government policy to form an accord with these people, not to own and control their land.”

  He let the remark pass without comment. “While you’re here, there’s another matter I wish to discuss. I know we are following different pathways, but may I have your opinion on a plan I’ve been thinking about putting into effect. We can’t have all these murders, and then retaliations, because the cycle of violence will have no end. We need some mechanism to break the chain.”

  She looked at him in interest. It was what she’d been proposing in letters and memos for weeks and weeks. Now he was acknowledging that perhaps she was correct. “What if I were to call all the leaders together, from all the different factions, as well as the Christians and the Jews, and just talk to them? Tell them about England’s intention, tell them they only have death to look forward to if they follow their current path? If I tell them Britain is entering into a mandate to create a smooth transition to self-government, do you think that would help to solve our difficulties?”

  “Frankly, while General Haldane is on leave, I think it’s the wisest thing to do. I’ll willingly act to put such a meeting of community leaders together. It might be too late, but it has to be done, Captain Wilson. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to compose a telegram to Winston which will induce him to act.”

  The response to her telegram took a week to arrive, by which time the entire senior command of General Headquarters in Iraq was on leave in Persia. Winston said he simply couldn’t believe such an act of self-centred stupidity could have been conducted by such a senior officer, and promised to raise it at his earliest opportunity.

  But solving one problem didn’t assist Gertrude in all of her difficulties, as the situation between Britons and Arabs intensified and the distance and animosity between Wilson and Gertrude grew even more intense as the mood of nationalism increased. Despite the meeting which took place and the agreements for seeking calm which had been made by the leaders of the Sunni, the Shi’ite and all the other stakeholders in the country, the people were inflamed with the prospect of self-rule, and wanted the British out of Iraq as quickly as possible.

  During the following weeks, the situation devolved into a nightmare. Captain Wilson was forced to organize aerial bombing of villages, which caused the situation to worsen considerably. Gertrude wrote to Thomas Lawrence that Wilson was like a man out of control, and his tactics were certain to lead to even more unpleasantness. She told him life in Iraq was doubly intolerable for her, and explained about the ridicule she was suffering under Wilson’s regime.

  Within a few days, she received a cable from her friend that he had taken her situation to heart, and he had asked a mutual friend to intervene. The cable was signed Lawrence of Arabia.

  One morning, she came into her office, opened the copy of The Times and read the first few inside pages carefully. Suddenly, when she got to page four, she read an item, and burst into uproarious peals of laughter, so much so some of her colleagues looked in to see what the commotion was all about.

  She ignored them, they would see for themselves when The Times was passed around the mess.

  When she was completely alone again, she re-read the glorious words of the report of the trouble in Iraq. In it, the Times’ correspondent, doubtless fed the line from Winston, had written an article in which he’d called Captain Wilson ‘a sun-dried bureaucrat set on Indianizing Mesopotamia’.

  It was, perhaps, the most glorious revenge she could ever have encompassed. She thanked God for her friendship with Winston Churchill, and for Thomas Lawrence’s intervention, and she marvelled yet again at Winston’s malicious sense of fun.

  ~

  Palais Wilson, League of Nations, Geneva, 1920

  For an organization formed to promote international cooperation and to achieve peace and security in the world, the League of Nations began its life with a breathtaking enigma. Headquartered in the magnificent edifice of Palais Wilson, a building renamed after the American president whose health was destroyed in his efforts to make the world come to its senses, the first General Assembly of all the signatories sat in the glaring absence of America, which refused to ratify its charter.

  As the delegates of the fifty-four member nations of the League walked through the labyrinthine corridors of the Pa
lais during the first days of its existence, many trying to remember how to return to their offices, many just sitting and talking to other delegates in relative privacy, the question uppermost on their minds was how to make the League work without America. There was so much to be done since the Paris Peace Conference, so many mandates to be agreed upon, and so many issues and disputes to be sorted out. But the single greatest issue on which all delegates agreed was the need to convince their governments that armed force was not the way to solve problems and that nobody ultimately won anything through war.

  The problem wasn’t the twenty nine Allied powers which had ratified the Peace Treaties of Paris, and thus become founding members of the League of Nations, nor was it the thirteen neutral nations which became members of the League in 1920. Indeed, many throughout the world keenly believed that following the war, which was now being called The War to End All Wars, an era of peace would break out, that leaders would realize the world couldn’t sustain millions of its finest young men being slaughtered, and that swords would at last be turned into plough shears.

  But a group of United States Senators, principally Henry Cabot Lodge, William Borah, and Hiram Johnson were vehemently opposed to ratifying the Covenant of the League, and led a tirade against President Wilson in the media, in the Senate, and on the hustings.

  They were incensed that Article 10 would undermine American sovereignty and violate George Washington’s last message to Congress to keep free of foreign entanglements. Their concern was that Article 10 would keep the United States permanently involved in international disputes and wars. The article allowed the Council of the League to determine how a threat to a member nation should be countered, and could commit the other members to going to war on behalf of a member under attack.

  The absence of the United States was particularly upsetting for the first President of the League of Nations, the Belgian diplomat and former foreign secretary of his country, Paul Hymans. The suave and canny European statesman had been at the Paris Peace Conference, and had done much to boost the prestige and participation of the world’s smaller nations in the putative League. But he, and everyone else, had assumed the president of America could carry his nation forward to sit with all other nations to determine the future of the world. Now, it appeared, the League would have to survive without the wealth and vitality of the United States.

  Hyams took his fob watch out of his waistcoat pocket, opened the silver face and stared at the time. He wound it up, clicked it shut, and replaced it in his pocket. It was a nervous act he repeated a dozen times an hour, and one day, his granddaughter had assured him, he would over-wind it, and break it.

  He picked up his gavel, and banged it on the oak desk set high on the plinth so he could oversee all the countries of the world.

  “Gentlemen,” he shouted. “Gentlemen, will the nations of the world please come to order.”

  He waited for ten minutes for the delegates to find their seats and to stop their negotiations and hurried conversations. Then he banged his gavel again, saw that it was precisely twelve o’clock midday, and shouted, “Gentlemen of the world, I have the honor of opening this tenth meeting of the General Assembly of the League of Nations. We begin with a prayer, and I call upon His Eminence, the Catholic Cardinal of Switzerland, to lead the Assembly. Will all delegates please be upstanding?”

  Everybody stood and bowed their head while the cardinal said a non-denominational blessing for the League and its work. Yesterday, a Lutheran had made a similar prayer, the day before an Anglican. Soon, he would have to deal with the vexed question of a mullah saying prayers for the assembly to assuage the sensitivities of the Muslim nations. What next, he wondered, a Rabbi and a witchdoctor?

  “Gentlemen, today on our order papers, we are to deal with the question of the allocation of League of Nations mandates to the governments of Great Britain and France for their control, in our name, of the territories of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and other parts of the dismantled former Ottoman Empire. I have ten speakers listed. The first speaker is the Honorable representative of the government of France.”

  After four hours of argument, disputes, debates, name calling, and bitter innuendo, Paul Hymans took out his watch, and checked the time. There was so much to debate, and the Middle East had taken up too much time already. Yet under the rules of debate, he wasn’t entitled to prevent any member nation from having its say . . . except for a little-known clause which he intended to exercise now, if the assembly was to have any hope of considering other topics before the day was out.

  He banged his gavel yet again, and shouted, “Gentlemen, under the emergency powers entrusted to the president of the Assembly, specifically those dealing with the Assembly’s powers to instigate an urgency motion within four hours of the close of business on any one day, I hereby bring this debate on the mandates of France and Great Britain to a close and refuse the right of any other country to enter into the discussion. I shall now call for a vote on the granting of mandates to these two member nations.”

  ~

  Damascus, Syria, July 1920

  It had been the pride of the Arabs, the first independent Arab government in centuries, a reason to convince the new League of Nations and the major powers of the world that Arabs were capable of ruling themselves.

  And now it was all over.

  Despite two years of begging, negotiations, threats, boycotts, violence, and consultations with anybody who would listen, the Arabic government of Syria was about to be ousted.

  The dream of an independent Syria had all begun with such promise. Prince Faisal had entered Damascus as a conqueror, earning his kingship in the way of past ages. He had held his head high while Damascenes cheered his progress through the streets of Arabia’s most revered capital. He used to enjoy telling people that as he rode through the ancient gates to claim the city, he could almost see the dust of the Turks running away.

  And the first few chaotic months had been nothing but inspirational, full of ambassadors from the Great Powers coming to pay homage to the world’s newest king, tribal chiefs promising him their undying loyalty, and religious leaders blessing his present and his future.

  He and those advisors he brought from Hejaz and Mesopotamia had to deal with issues of civil administration which were foreign to them—water, sewage, roads, education, defense, housing, street lights, the marketplace—the list of things was endless. And yes, there’d been many mistakes along the way. But nobody, no visitor or resident, could deny the country was being run as efficiently and effectively as it had been run by the Turkish administration, and unlike the Beys and absentee landlords who raped the country and sucked its finances into Constantinople, Faisal and his administrators were everywhere, listening to problems, attempting to find solutions, and building structures which, they hoped, would last.

  Everyone in the world, it seemed, had hoped his government would be able to learn how to run the country. Everyone except the French. Despite Faisal’s pleas with Clemenceau, the French adamantly refused to recognize his regime. And despite the pressure which the British had brought to bear, the old fox in the Elysee Palace stood firm and resolute and declared Syria was French, and no upstart regime from an Offenbach operetta would prevent France from claiming what was rightfully hers.

  Clemenceau had ordered further troops be sent to Beirut, and the expanded army, commanded by General Henri Gouraud began its march towards Damascus to oust the puppet of Britain who called himself king, and to rule the land as it was meant to be ruled, by the French and for the French.

  King Faisal sat on his throne, and read the ultimatum. He shook his head, looking at his young brother Zeid, and shrugged his shoulders. It was July 14th, one hundred and thirty one years to the day since an outraged mob of Parisians, seeking arms to fight the government, had stormed the Bastille and released the prisoners of influence. Now the government was storming Faisal’s stronghold. What irony.

  “Well,” said Zeid. “Do we fight or run
?”

  “How can we fight? They’re marching with artillery and rifles and we’re out-gunned and our forces are out-manned.”

  “And no word from your wonderful friends, Great Britain?” he asked scornfully.

  Faisal shook his head.

  The two men remained silent. As did all their advisors who had run out of advice.

  “What does the ultimatum ask?” asked Nuri al-Sa’id, Faisal’s most trusted counsellor.

  “What you would expect,” he said curtly. “The general presents his respects, and informs me he and his army will shortly be in Damascus to take the city and to enforce the League of Nation’s mandate. He says because of the mandate, France is now in command of Syria and Lebanon, and he will take over immediate control of all Arabic armies in the countries, the economy, the railroads, and all instruments of government control. He informs me I may remain in Damascus if I wish, and I am entitled to call myself Sir or The Honorable, anything but king.”

  Faisal threw down the ultimatum document in disgust. Nuri al-Sa’id bent down to pick it up, recognizing its importance to the history of his people.

  “We have guns, we have artillery! Why don’t we fight?” asked Zeid. “What did the fight against the Ottomans show if not that the Arabs are a brave and courageous people who will no longer tolerate an overlord? I say we close the gates to these men who would be our masters, post guards on the city walls, and fight them.”

  Faisal breathed deeply. “And how many of my people will die before we’re forced to come to terms with the harsh reality which is the modern world? My government lasted only as long as the British were willing to allow it to last. Once the British withdrew their support and placed our future in the League of Nations, we were lost. Britain has its mandate over Iraq and Palestine. It has the oil it needs for its ships and motorcars and its industry. So why should it waste its time with supporting Syria and Faisal? Why should it alienate the French when it can hide behind the League of Nations? I tell you, my brothers, this is a black day for the Arabic people.”