Gertrude Bell (46 page)

Oh my dearest ones it's so wonderful here—I can't tell you how much I'm loving it . . . I wonder what inheritance from Cumbrian farmers can have developed unexpectedly into so compelling an at-home-ness with the East?

I have grown to love this land, its sights and its sounds. I never weary of the East, just as I never feel it to be alien. I cannot feel exiled here; it is a second native country. If my family were not in England I should have no wish to return.

She scarcely missed a day's work. She was needed as never before, but she had to prove herself all over again. In his sketch of this period when government was being established in Iraq, Cox wrote:

When I told [the GOC] that some of my office staff were coming up from Basra, including Miss Bell, [he] expressed considerable misgiving at the news, as he feared her arrival might form an inconvenient precedent for appeals from other ladies, but I reminded him that her services had been specifically offered to me by his predecessor as an ordinary member of my Secretariat; that I regarded and treated her no differently from any male officer of my Staff, and that her particular abilities could be very useful to me at the present moment. In due course she arrived and was not long in establishing happy personal relations with Sir Stanley Maude.

The forging of these “happy personal relations” described by Cox, the consummate diplomat, were no doubt much to Gertrude's credit, but she made her real feelings clear to her family after Maude's death from cholera a few months later, when Hugh had written to ask her what she had thought of him. It was Maude's brilliant military campaign that had won Baghdad and almost effaced the tragedy of Kut from the public mind, but he was a man of limited perspective and had made the work of the administrators more difficult. The objection to the presence of a woman in a man's world, even in the rare instance of that woman's being supremely well qualified to be there, had several times in her life been couched in terms of a concession to one precipitating some “monstrous regiment” to follow. This was bound to exasperate Gertrude. Her brief portrait of Maude is scathing and, despite his recent death, unmitigated in its contempt, not so much for the man, but for the type of military mind she had so often had to fight as a woman and as an administrator:

General Maude was essentially a soldier; he had no knowledge of statecraft and regarded it as totally unnecessary . . . He was determined beyond the
verge of obstinacy, a narrow intelligence confined to one channel and the more forcible for its concentration. I knew him very little . . . If he had lived there would have been a desperate tussle when administrative problems began to become more important than military. The time was near when questions which he had insisted on regarding as purely administrative and therefore of no immediate concern . . . could no longer be neglected or treated on purely military lines.

The army wins the territory, and the administration takes over: but in Mesopotamia the struggle to install conditions conducive to peace and eventual prosperity would prove as daunting as the battlefront itself. The prospect for the nucleus British administration in Baghdad was dismal, the future opaque. Roughly half of Mesopotamia was under precarious British control, but the Turks were fighting on in the north. Arabs spoke a common language but were not a common people. Mesopotamia was not a country but a province of a derelict empire. Iraq was not a nation. The very names caused confusion. Mesopotamia, Greek for “between the rivers,” was the historic and archaeological term used in the West for what the Arabs called “Al Iraq,” “the Iraq.” The Arab term originally referred to the area of the Basra
vilayet
and Kuwait in the south, but when they took over, the British used it to describe the territory of the three
vilayets
Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. In 1932, at full independence, the country was officially recognized as “Iraq.”

In 1917, practical difficulties confronted the British in all directions. Lack of food was the most urgent, for many of the irrigation systems necessary to agriculture had crumbled from neglect, and much of what was left had been destroyed in the war. The two opposing armies had consumed any food surplus, and as the Turks had withdrawn to the north, they had followed what was virtually a scorched-earth policy, taking any valuables and destroying any crops they could not consume. Even the climate had done its worst, and the famously fertile Euphrates basin was facing its third growing season without rain. The population was becoming hungry, and disease was spreading. In the cities the sanitation system had collapsed, and the one hospital in Baghdad—formerly the British Residency—was discovered to be in an indescribable condition, with a few horribly wounded men struggling to maintain life. In the countryside, the farmers were eating their seed grain instead of planting it, for
anything they grew had been confiscated, time and again. No one knew who would now own the land, or who would have to pay what taxes. Starvation, disaffection, and lawlessness could well be just around the corner. If the administration could not pull the country together at once and get it running, if Basra and Baghdad collapsed into anarchy, the army of some hundred thousand troops would not be able to hold the country down. Administrative problems were compounded by lack of funds from His Majesty's Government and an absence of military cooperation, until the welcome arrival of Maude's more amenable successor, Lieutenant-General Sir William Marshall.

In spite of these massive difficulties, there was a noble determination on the part of Cox and his staff to get it right. They were dedicated to instituting benevolent, effective government and to serving honourably the peoples of the Basra and Baghdad
vilayets
with their multitudinous identities and problems. It was the idea above all that inspired and excited Gertrude:

Nowhere in the war-shattered universe can we begin more speedily to make good the immense losses sustained by humanity . . . It's an immense opportunity, just at this time when the atmosphere is so emotional; one catches hold of people as one will never do again, and establishes relations which won't dissolve. It is not for my own sake, but because it greases the wheels of administration—it really does, and I want to watch it all very carefully almost from day to day, so as to be able to take what I hope may be . . . a decisive hand in [the] final disposition. I shall be able to do that, I shall indeed, with the knowledge I'm gaining. It's so intimate. They are beyond words outgoing to me. What does anything else matter when the job is such a big one? There never was anything quite like this before, you must understand that—it's amazing.

It's the making of a new world.

After the British defeat at Kut, the army, now reinforced and led by General Maude, had begun again to roll back the Turkish mantle. Like the roof being stripped from a derelict house, it exposed to the daylight the rotten timbers, rat-infested rooms, and insanitary corners of a moribund empire. For some five hundred years the Turks had exploited Mesopotamia: their officials with sinecures in the Baghdad offices had
maintained their comfortable lifestyles by disguising the reality under a sea of paper. The good government that it purported to document was nothing more than make-believe. Corruption was condoned throughout the Empire; most of its operatives, either unsalaried or paid a pittance, lived on bribery and extortion. The building and maintenance of municipal and provincial public works, roads and bridges, sanitation and lighting, houses, hospitals, schools—all had been recorded on paper, but had never been carried out. Infant mortality was as high as ever.

Turkish bureaucracy had imposed its dark empire over the length and breadth of Mesopotamia by a policy of division and dominance. The language of law, business, administration, and education was Turkish, not Arabic. The peasant farmers were forced to pay rent in lieu of tax to the new urban owners of their land, selected by the Turks, and very little of that rent found its way back into improvement of their farms. The traders in the towns had had to buy a permit every time they made a sale or a purchase, imported or exported. The chosen few amassed wealth from their privileged positions. A court case was won in Baghdad only by payment to the judge, who might have no qualifications for his position. An appeal against a legal decision could be lost for years, even decades, in the Kafkaesque courts of Constantinople, after which it would be referred back again to Baghdad.

As the Turks retreated they destroyed their paperwork, and their beneficiaries went with them, taking their records and all trace of a system. They left behind only the animosity that they had fostered for so long. In the desert, particularly on either side of the Euphrates valley where they had partitioned the lands of some fifty tribes, they had pitted sheikh against sheikh and built on the destruction of native elements of order.

The vacuum left by the departing power was complicated by the fact that the Turks were Sunni Muslims. They had given preference in almost every aspect of national life to Sunni personnel and culture and had taken into their own hands the immensely wealthy Muhammadan charitable trusts, or
Auqaf
, in the form of property dedicated in perpetuity to pious purposes. Ignoring the intended beneficiaries, the Turks devoted the income accruing from this to the building of new Sunni mosques and to the salaries of those employed in them. The object of the exercise was to remit as much money as possible to Constantinople. One effect of this policy was that Shia mosques and properties were allowed
to fall into ruin. The historic enmities between the majority Shia population and the Sunnis were thus deepened.

The British administration would be able to establish a government of any kind only if it won a largely united backing. In a land where there were perhaps more races, creeds, and allegiances than anywhere else in the world, it had to identify and engage every prominent man capable of persuading his adherents to cooperate. It had to persuade them of the benefits of the new economic initiatives and regulations. Disparate in character and education, traditionally susceptible to corruption of every sort, jealous of their position to the point of enmity with every neighbour, these leaders came to the Secretariat from ragged tents as well as Baghdad palaces. They had held sway under the Ottoman Empire by reason of wealth or the number of their followers, by land ownership imposed by the Turks or won in tribal wars, or by inheritance and descent from the Prophet. From the most promising of these, Cox and Gertrude hoped against all the odds to find Iraq's future administrators and political leaders.

During the spring and summer of 1917, the British Indian army was fully occupied in consolidating its position round Baghdad, which left no detachments for outlying areas. The Turks were dispensing virulent anti-British propaganda, as well as a flow of money to potential dissidents. It was hard for the tribes to believe that the new occupiers of Baghdad would hold on to their conquest, or that the Turks would not eventually return, ready to exact a horrible revenge on all who had placed their trust in the British. The first overtures of the sheikhs and other Mesopotamian notables were made in the spirit of insurance in case the British should stay. The single incentive for joining forces with the British remained the Arab prize of self-determination, so far the vaguest of concepts. To the Shia
mujtahids
, the religious representatives of the biggest proportion of the population, it meant a theocratic state under Sharia law; to the Sunnis and free-thinkers of Baghdad it meant an independent Arab state under an amir; to the tribes in the deserts and mountains it meant no government at all.

It was shortage of food that brought more tribes over to the administration, now in command of central transport and distribution. They were warmly welcomed by Gertrude, whatever their political or personal past: “Today there rolled in a whole band of sheikhs from the Euphrates.
Most of them I hadn't seen before, though I know them all well by name and by exploit; hard-bitten rogues—but so attractive!—It's all to the good, especially if we can get them to sowing wheat and barley this winter,” she wrote on 2 February.

Once face-to-face with Gertrude and then Cox, they had to be convinced that British administration would be benevolent, that their rights would be maintained, and that the British were prepared for the huge expenditure in both effort and money that would secure their various ways of life. They were welcomed, listened to, their situations comprehended. Word spread, and enormous numbers now descended on Cox's new Secretariat to lodge their separate interests—nomadic tribesmen, traders, farmers, landowners, owners of wells and watercourses, importers of tobacco and other goods, exporters, businessmen, religious representatives, figureheads of every kind had to be persuaded to support the new regime. Each one had to be met with proper traditional courtesies, such as the giving of small presents, and lengthy discussions had to take place. If they did not make the first approach, they had to be invited, and the most distinguished, particularly the religious leaders, had to be visited.

Who was there, other than Gertrude, who would recognize and be recognized by so many of them, who could identify their status and interests, who could interview them in their own language or dialect, who could assess and reassure them?

Perhaps no other Westerner understood as thoroughly as Gertrude how these people had emerged from their history. She was an expert on the Bedouin who, since before the Prophet, had flowed for centuries out of the meagre lands of the Yemen into the desert, carrying the few dates, clothes, and arms that they could trade. She had described their journeys from village to village, oasis to oasis, to the towns, selling off their camels in the northern market-places as they arrived. Reaching the fertile lands of the Euphrates and the Tigris, they had begun to breed a few sheep on the fringes of the grass. She had followed the settlement of those who, having made a little money, had been able to move to watered land and start to farm. She knew the new generations of Bedouin who had begun to trade in grain and goods brought from across the desert, numbering among her friends many who had continued as nomads as well as those who had settled down, and the increasing number who had begun to divide their year between the two ways of life. She had watched the bigger
traders, attracted by the markets, learning to manipulate the economy as the cities grew in size and importance. She had been befriended by the Christian professionals, clerks, and teachers who had come from southern Russia and the Mediterranean. She had travelled among the mountainous tribes of the north as they adapted from a life of fighting to one of farming. She had appreciated the hospitality of the Kurds and noted the explosive mix of races and religions in the unmapped northern territory they shared with the historic peoples of Armenia, Assyria, Turkey, and northern Persia. She understood the hereditary lines of Arab families. She knew just how to approach a
mujtahid
or a Sunni cleric, a
mullah
, a
mukhtar
or a
mutawalli
.