Gertrude Bell (45 page)

The visit over, Gertrude worked on through appalling weather conditions, not knowing if it was preferable in winter, with all roads turned to mud and planks bridging the open drains, or in summer when, to a Yorkshirewoman born and bred, the heat was unbearable: “Last night I woke at 1 am to find the temperature still over 100 and myself lying in a pool. My silk nightgown goes into the bath with me in the morning, is wrung out and needs no more bother” . . . “one's bath water, drawn from a tank on the roof, is never under 100 . . . but it doesn't steam—the air's hotter,”
she wrote to her parents. With the constant washing, her clothes were dropping to pieces. She was having to get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to mend them—something her maid Marie had always done for her in England. Her desperate requests for clothes were sometimes fruitful:

One wears almost nothing, fortunately, still it's all the more essential that that nothing should not be in holes . . . To think that I was once clean and tidy! . . . Thank you so much—I have a lace evening gown, a white crepe gown, a stripy blue muslin gown, two shirts and a stripy silk gown, all most suitable . . . and the box and umbrella have come too!

But she was often disappointed, as a letter of 20 January 1917 reveals:

A box has just arrived from Marte—it ought to have contained a black satin gown, but it has been opened and the gown has been abstracted. Isn't it infuriating? All that was left was a small cardboard box inside, containing the little black satin coat Marte sent with the gown, some net, and a gold flower . . .

She missed having a family of her own even more, now, in the almost exclusively male world that she occupied. She felt the lack of a woman friend, but almost the only women she met were Lady Cox, her boss's wife, the occasional temporary teacher or missionary, and “the notable Miss Jones”—the likeable but very busy matron of the officers' hospital and rest house down river. Gertrude was her grateful patient when, exhausted by temperatures of around 107 degrees combined with Basra's lack of good food, she went down with a bad bout of jaundice in September that year. She wrote to Florence: “Do you know I've never been so ill as this before. I hadn't an idea what it was like to feel so deadly weak that you couldn't move your body much nor hold your mind at all.”

After her convalescence, she returned to writing her reports. She told Hugh and Florence:

The amount I've written during the last year is appalling. Some of it is botched together out of reports, some spun out of my own mind and former knowledge, and some an attempt to fix the far corners of the new world we are discovering now, and some dry as dust tribal analyses, dull, but perhaps
more useful than most things . . . But it's sometimes exasperating to be obliged to sit in an office when I long to be out in the desert, seeing the places I hear of, and finding out about them for myself . . . One can't do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it.

“Botched together . . . dry as dust . . . dull”—never was Gertrude more disingenuous. She knew that her essays were beginning to be celebrated by the high commands in India, Egypt, the Sudan, and London for their lively and often humorous clarifications of political situations and for their crisply entertaining character portraits. In another letter home she admits as much: “Happy to tell you that I hear my utterances receive a truly preposterous attention in London.”

Some reports she wrote as part of her duty to the Arab Bureau, or as contributions to the
Arab Bulletin
. They added to her fame as perhaps the most prominent British personality in the Middle East. Some of her other essays, collected together as
The Arab of Mesopotamia
, were produced as an instruction manual for British officers on arrival in Basra. Forbiddingly entitled
The Pax Britannica in the Occupied Territories of Mesopotamia; or The Basis of Government in Turkish Arabia
, these pieces would turn out to be delightfully easy to enjoy while telling the neophyte officer all he needed to know. Turning to an essay on “Star Worshippers,” he would learn that the tenets of this strange sect entailed living next to running water, practising polygamy, and believing that the world is actually a great egg; also, that they had invented a book which could be read simultaneously by two priests sitting on either side of a stream. “One wonders how this curious growth will fare in the new soil of British administration,” Gertrude remarked.

“Officialdom,” wrote Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, director of the Arab Bureau from 1916, “could never spoil the freshness and vividness of her style or the terseness of her descriptions. Throughout them all can be seen the breadth of her knowledge, and her sympathy and understanding for the people whom she loved so well.” Tired politicians and hard-pressed political officers working through their in-trays would have turned with relief and anticipation to the polished résumés signed “G.L.B.” She was in a class of her own when describing the government of Turkish Arabia as a fiction: “No country which turned to the eye of the world an appearance of established rule and centralized Government
was, to a greater extent than the Ottoman Empire, a land of make-believe”; or when detailing the intricacies of the internal politics of Muscat—“Sultan Seyyid Feisal ibn Turki saw in the suppression of the arms trade by the British Government a distinct advantage to himself, since his rebellious subjects became unable to furnish themselves with weapons to use against him”—or when explaining the tribal fights of the Shamiyah, which meant “the taking of an enemy by a surprise raid . . . the casualties may be in some cases more, in others rather less, than those of a football match.”

Gertrude's letters to Florence, Hugh, and the rest of her family were as beautifully written, more personal but sometimes as far-reaching. Writing home two or three times a week was a sacred commitment, a substitute for spending time with them, subsequently almost an apology for hardly ever returning home. It became ever more difficult to envisage going back for a visit, what with the laborious journey and the length of time that she would have to be away, not to speak of all that she would be missing in this eastern sphere of the war.

Keeping in touch with the people she loved, most of all her father, was an escape from the arid, lonely, masculine world of work and war. The letters centred her, reminding her of who she was and where she came from. She could always interest herself in her father's affairs, whether political or commercial, but it sometimes occurred to her that the interests of Florence, Elsa, and Molly, even of Maurice and Hugo, were on a very different scale to her own. We know that she often massaged or omitted the facts, to spare them anxiety, and took trouble not to write too much of Mesopotamian affairs for fear of boring them. Just as when she had worked in the Wounded and Missing Office, Gertrude occasionally had to absorb accounts of atrocities and massacres, without anyone to confide in or distract her from the nightmare scenarios that these events opened out before her. She felt the lack of a husband and family more than ever now. At home Molly, and Elsa to a lesser extent, with their growing families and urgent domestic concerns, smiled over her importance and called her, however affectionately, “the Great Gertrude.” Meanwhile she wrote back of their preoccupations as if they were as important to her as the affairs of the nation. Only to Chirol did she come close to admitting the truth: “The only interesting letters I have—except yours—are from the Arab Bureau in Egypt. I write to them
weekly and they keep me pretty well posted as to Hejaz and Syrian matters . . . My family write nothing except about their own affairs, which I like to hear too, bless them.”

Cox and Gertrude, now working hand in hand and alongside Wilson and other staff, had done much to establish order in the Basra
vilayet
, pursuing beneficial policies in relation to agriculture, finance, law, and education. They brought local sheikhs into the process of government, and paid them to rule their traditional districts. Unfortunately, this first foray into Arab self-determination was dissipated in corruption and mismanagement. British administrators had to be sent to work alongside the sheikhs in the remoter districts.

The winter campaign under General Maude saw the recovery of Kut and the advance on Baghdad, which was occupied by British forces on 11 March 1917. The centre of gravity moved north, and Gertrude awaited Sir Percy's summons to join him in Baghdad to set up a nucleus for his new Secretariat. She wrote home:

I had a letter from Sir Percy to-day, from the Front, full of exultation and confidence . . . It's the first big success of the war, and I think it is going to have varied and remarkable consequences. We shall, I trust, make it a great centre of Arab civilization, a prosperity; that will be my job partly, I hope, and I never lose sight of it . . . I can't tell you how wonderful it is to be in at the birth, so to speak, of a new administration.

The call came, and she went up river on a crowded steamer: nine days in the humid heat with a couple of nurses and six hundred troops. At Rounton, the Bells received a two-word telegram: “Address Bagdad.”

There were many such as Arnold Wilson who remained convinced that only complete British control would secure the oil supply for the British navy and the Empire. Equally there were people like Hardinge, who believed that any form of Arab partnership would lead to chaos in the Middle East and deprive the Empire of its links between Europe, India, and the rest of the East. They were to be proved wrong. By means of the blending of British administration with Arab self-determination and pride, good government was about to be established. Stability would go
on very nearly unbroken until 1920, the oil would continue to flow, and a benevolent British interest would be maintained. The sensitivity to Middle Eastern minds and attitudes that Gertrude brought to the administration would enable her to achieve what nobody believed was possible. This was the great task that lay ahead of her in Baghdad.

G
ertrude had anticipated her arrival in Baghdad for weeks, and longed to live once more in that great city where she had many friends already. With relief she disembarked from the overloaded boat and made her way through the steamy, crowded quayside to where Cox's car was waiting. At the office she received a warm welcome from her chief and his handful of staff. She did not know where she would be spending the night, but after twelve months in a single room in the Basra headquarters she hoped for something more spacious, and cooler. She was reassured to hear that a house had been allotted to her, and set off in the car again, address in hand.

The car stopped in a dirty, noisy little bazaar. A sycophantic landlord appeared and ushered her into a stifling box of a house without running water or a stick of furniture. She had brought a few pieces from Basra, but they were not yet unloaded; her servant Mikhail had remained with the boat to collect them. However, experienced voyager as she was, she had not parted with her old canvas bed and bath, which she now set up in the grubby rooms: “I unpacked my box which had been dropped into the Tigris, and hung out all the things to dry on the railings . . . It was breathlessly hot. I hadn't so much as a chair to put things on, and when I wanted water for washing I had to open my front door and call in the help of the bazaar.”

She dined with Sir Percy, then returned to the house to sleep. Later, she was awakened by a hammering on the door. It was Mikhail, arriving with the rest of her luggage. Morning came with all the heat and noise of
inner-city Baghdad: “I confess that after having done my hair and breakfasted on the floor I felt a little discouraged.”

She would not bother Cox: she was here on exactly the same terms as the rest of his staff, and he had more important things to do. She put on her straw hat and set out on foot to find a better house, making her way down to the cooler, tree-shaded spaces by the river, near to the political office in the pre-war Austrian embassy. She came almost at once to an old wall surrounding a large overgrown garden with cool trees and a profusion of pink roses. Peering through the iron gate she saw a stone water-tank at the end of a short drive, and beyond it, not a house, but three run-down summer-houses, with birds perched on the roofs. Part of the property was an extensive date-palm garden—a place where it would be cool to walk in the evening.

Sometimes the places where we live for important parts of our lives seem to find us, and so it was with Gertrude in April 1917. Here was the lovely spot where she would live for the rest of her life. Making enquiries of the neighbours, she discovered that the garden belonged to a wealthy proprietor she knew and liked, Musa Chalabi. A visit to his home resolved all that needed to be resolved, and the next ten days were spent in rapid alterations and repairs. In early May she installed herself in the first of the summer-houses, and then moved from one to the other as a modern kitchen and bathroom were added. She had everything painted white, and employed a gardener, a cook, and an old man she knew and trusted, Shamao, to run the household. Sun-blinds were put up at all the windows, plants and wicker furniture installed on the deep wooden verandas. She put up her two writing desks and filled all her vases with flowers. The furthest building she turned over to accommodation for the servants, and before long there were women hanging out washing while a baby played in the grass at their feet. She had at last a home and a garden of her own. She planted beds of cottage flowers—iris, verbena, chrysanthemums—violets in pots, yellow hollyhock seeds sent from Darlington, and cabbages. A short while later she was able to boast that she had managed to get daffodils into flower—the first ever seen in Mesopotamia. She wrote home on the 17th: