Authors: Georgina Howell
There was the sense, in the Bureau, of a secret agenda. They even gave themselves a name: the “Intrusives.” Lawrence wrote of their subversive intention of infiltrating the corridors of power to “foster the new Arabic world.” Their first convert was the High Commissioner himself, the efficient, loyal, but unimaginative Sir Henry McMahon. Subjected to the steady seepage of Gilbert Clayton's persuasive influence and already disillusioned by the failure of the military in Sinai, with their complacent and inflexible views, he was the first to understand and approve.
The Intrusives held their views on Arab self-determination in opposition to Delhi. They could hardly move ahead with their plans for an Arab uprising without support from India, and they were not going to get it. The Viceroy and his government in India believed vehemently that British rule should be imposed over all Arabs, and that it would succeed as it had succeeded in the Raj. After all, they had managed to run India with only fifty thousand British troops. The view in Cairo was more realistic. As the war dragged on, Britain would have little hope of financing imperialist governments in a new continent. The Bureau played that card for all it was worth, pointing out that influence cost less than control.
In the intense, lengthy debates that Gertrude now joined, they explored the possibility of defeating the Turks by other, “non-British” methods of warfare: by funding insurrection, cutting railway lines, hijacking supplies, fostering terrorism, leading guerrilla warfare. Gertrude's participation, and her knowledge of Arab methods and customs,
helped them crystallize these ideas. She was, after all, probably the only one among themâexplorers, desert travellers allâwho had actually taken part in a
ghazzu
. It would be possible to assemble an Arab army against the Turks, she said, if the men's pride in the notion of Arab self-determination was strong enough. There would have to be considerable funds made available. Money would be needed for two reasons: because it was impossible to move through a sheikh's territory without payment, and because neither the Bedouin nor the desert villagers would leave their camel herds or homes to fight, unless the family income they would be losing was replaced from another source. The Arab fighter was a mercenary, not a volunteer.
The Indian government remained determined to extend its authority in Arabia and to annex Mesopotamia. The Viceroy made his feelings clear in a stinging letter to the Foreign Office:
I devoutly hope that this proposed Arab state will fall to pieces, if it is ever created. Nobody could possibly have devised a scheme more detrimental to British interests in the Middle East than this. It simply means misgovernment, chaos and corruption, since there never can be and never has been any consistency or cohesion among the Arab tribes . . . I cannot tell you how detrimental I think this interference and influence from Cairo has been.
With this letter, he engendered opposition to the Bureau from London as well.
By then Gertrude had finished her initial report on the tribes, which was received by General Headquarters with mounting respect for its completeness and detail. Having supplied what she had been asked for, she might now quite respectably have returned to a depressed wartime England, the Wounded and Missing Office, and a London full of sad memory. Instead she reflected on the damaging feud between Cairo and Delhi and on the determinations of the Viceroy. Lord Hardinge, the grand and highly decorated former ambassador at St. Petersburg and Paris, personally chosen and officially approved adviser to the King on foreign affairs, was none other than Gertrude's old friend from the days of snowy walks in Bucharest, Charles Hardinge. Knowing him as she did, and understanding the problems as she did, was there anything she could do to improve matters between India and Cairo? “It is essential India
and Egypt should keep in the closest touch since they are dealing with two sides of the same problem,” she would write to Captain Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence in London, on 20 February 1916.
Gertrude talked to Clayton: Might she go to Delhi? The ostensible reason for her journey would be to complete her tribal data with information that she could get only from India's Foreign Department. Comprehending as the Intrusives did that there could be no pan-Arab nation, but unable to broadcast the fact because it had been held out by Kitchener to Hussain as a possibility, her real agenda would be to reassure Hardinge that Cairo understood just as well as Delhi that such a nation could never exist, but that, as the only reason for the Arab tribes to unite against the Turks, the pretence had to be maintained, however uncomfortable. She would put the case for employing new tactics against the Turks, and try to open the minds of those who ran the Raj to the possibilities of Arab guerrilla warfare. She was already, privately, forming a complicated scheme to foster Arab self-determination despite all.
If Hardinge had a close friend in India with him at the time, it was the distinguished
Times
correspondent Sir Valentine Ignatius Chirol, Gertrude's “dearest Domnul,” to whom she now sent a cable. The man who understood better than anyone how much she had loved Doughty-Wylie, and whose kindly disposition had caused him much anxiety about her, Chirol had mentioned to Hardinge that she had been ill and depressed and was now working in an official capacity in Cairo. Through Domnul's good auspices, Gertrude now received a warm invitation from the Viceroy.
In a letter written at the end of January, Clayton showed his unqualified approval of her plan, and his confidence in her ability to carry out this complex and crucial piece of diplomacy. He hints at the real purpose of her journey:
. . . the people in India cling so firmly to the wrong end of the stick that they are hard to deal with. Miss Gertrude Bell is leaving here today for India, partly at my instigation and with the full approval of the High Commissioner. She is, as you know, one of the great authorities on Arabia and Syria and has been working under me for some months. She is fully conversant with the Arab questions and entirely agrees with our policy. As she is an intimate friend of the Viceroy and of Sir Valentine Chirol (who carries much
weight), and is going to stay with the Viceroy, I think that she may succeed in inducing a better impression of what the Arab question really means.
Hardinge was to write later, in his memoirs:
It was at this time that I heard that Miss Gertrude Bell, whom I had known many years before as the niece of Sir Frank Lascelles, and who was employed in the Military Intelligence Department at Cairo, was ill and unhappy on account of the death of a very great friend in the operations at Gallipoli. I asked her to come to pay me a visit at Delhi, where she would have an opportunity of studying the Arab information at the disposal of the Foreign Department.
Gertrude now wrote a letter to her father in which she slightly rearranges the order of events. With her anxiety for Hugh's good opinion in all matters, and in view of the magnitude of the politics which she was proposing to manipulate, she wanted to deflect any impression he might get that his daughter was becoming over-ambitious or self-important:
When I got Lord H's message through Domnul I suggested that it might be a good plan if I, a quite unimportant and unofficial person, were to take advantage of the Viceroy's invitation and go out to see what could be done by putting this side of the case before them . . . My chief has approved . . . So I'm going. I feel a little anxious about it, but take refuge in my own extreme obscurity and the general kindness I find everywhere. The pull one has in being so unofficial is that if one doesn't succeed, no one is any the worse. I shall find Domnul at Delhi which will make everything easy, otherwise I don't think I should have the face to set out on a political mission.
Excitement soon overtook anxiety. On 28 January, as she threw her clothes into a case, she dashed off another letter: “I'm off finally at a moment's notice to catch a troop ship at Suez. I really do the oddest things. I learnt at 3 pm that I could catch it if I left at 6 pm which did not allow much time for thought. I'm charged with much negotiationâand I hope I may be well inspired.”
An officer who was at Cairo at the time was to tell Florence that he never saw anyone mobilize as quickly as Miss Bell.
The new name “Intrusive” fitted her perfectly. It was what she had been all her life. She had achieved her purposes in the desert by intruding into the Bedouin camps. She had intruded into the corridors of power by directly approaching the statesmen she knew and supplying the information they required. Now she was planning her most important venture so far: she was about to intrude into the crucial determinations of the British Empire.
Five days on a troop ship gave her time to assemble her ideas. There were so many layers, so many duplicities, to the Arab question. The Bureau were going ahead with Kitchener's policy of engineering an Arab revolt, perhaps the only way left that might change the fortunes of the war. They had to maintain a promise of independence amongst the Arabs that would be impossible to fulfil. Even those in the British administration who thought it worth a try to engineer a revolt were not prepared to consider why the tribes should take the risk, nor what prize they might get out of it. What the Arabs wanted, the British could not give, and would not give even if they could. At one and the same time, the Intrusives had to convince the Arabs that independence was possible, whilst accepting the conviction in the corridors of British and Allied power that it was not. The Bureau could not act alone, although Lawrence would force the issue: to support the Arabs, they would need funds, food, guns, ammunition, and military backup.
Gertrude came to reassure the Viceroy that a pan-Arab nation would never come to pass, that Cairo knew it, and that Hardinge could relax his concerns. She would point out that for the last few months the Sharif and his sons had been engaged in trying to patch up tribal feuds on the northern reaches of the Hejaz railway as a preliminary to what she called “the smallest measure of combination.” She would agree that the Arab Independence Movement was a mirage if considered as a bond of union in the Arab provinces. She would venture to sketch a possible model of administrative union after the defeat of the Turks, depending on the full cooperation of the British and French Allies at the end of the war, and their inclusion of Arab representatives in their deliberations. Hardinge would undoubtedly tell her that an Arab revolt would cause havoc in India, and to this she would have to find a way of saying the unsayable. Only Kitchener, with no such scruples, would express the sentiment in the most brutal of words: “Better to lose India than lose the war.”
She took stock and wrote up her memoranda, working all morning and again after dinner in the room that, in the ship's liner days, had been used as the nursery. On board she found a chaplain who knew her half-brother Hugo, and agreed to his request to address the soldiers on board, the 23rd and 24th Rifle Corps. “They get so bored,” she wrote home on 1 February, “. . . I shall love to do anything to amuse them. The adjutant has also asked me to give a conference on Mesopotamia to the officers which I shall like less.”
Disembarking at Karachi, she took the sweltering train to Delhi, arriving white with dust. Domnul was there to meet her at the station, and while they laughed and talked her luggage was put into the shiny flagged staff car which was to take them to the viceregal lodge. Just as had been provided for the important guests at the coronation durbar in 1903, her quarters were three cool canvas rooms in a luxurious tent, one of an avenue of tents in the beautiful viceregal gardens. There were a sitting room, bedroom, and bathroom, all carpeted and magnificently furnished, set with flowers and a tea table, and plenty of servants. As she sat catching up with Domnul, the tent flap lifted and in came Charles Hardinge on a welcoming visit and to invite her to dinner. She curtsied to him and remembered to call him “Your Excellency.”
Over the next few days, Gertrude was shoehorned into Hardinge's schedule for several long conversations. She was invited to peruse the files that she had expressed interest in, and embarked on what she saw as her real job. From his memoirs it appears that Hardinge never quite understood that in his seemingly more casual exchanges with Gertrude lay the true purpose of her visit.
In between these taxing confrontations, she was entertained and escorted by Domnul, and attended a colourful meeting of the Legislative Council. One memorable afternoon, with Hardinge and his party, she was shown around the new Delhi by its architect Edwin Lutyens: “It was very wonderful seeing it with him who had invented it all, and though I knew the plans . . . I didn't realize how gigantic it is. They have blasted away hills and filled up valleys . . . the roads are laid out that lead from it to the four corners of India, and down each vista you see the ruins of some older imperial Delhi.”
She talked with the foreign affairs officials, scrutinized the files that were her overt reason for being in Delhi, and had secret dossiers opened for her. It was arranged that she should go up to Simla for a few days, to meet and talk to the intelligence staff there. Initially wary, they quickly came to appreciate her grasp of the issues, and after her return to the Viceroy's camp they sent an officer after her to discuss how better to coordinate the work between Egypt and India. She devised a scheme for this, and sent it off for Cairo's approval. At the same time they invited her to help edit their journal, the
Gazetteer of Arabia
. She thought her visit had been profitable, she told her father, but did not go into details. “I have . . . talked about Arabia till I am weary of the very word . . . I think I have pulled things straight a little as between Delhi and Cairo.”
Back in old Delhi, she was an interested guest at a state dinner given for the Maharajah of Mysore and his suite, a man of such noble caste that the Viceroy had to build a six-room house merely to receive him. The Maharajah could not eat or pray, Hardinge told Gertrude, except in rooms of a certain size and arranged in a certain order.