Gertrude Bell (50 page)

Throughout central and southern Mesopotamia, the British army provided an unlimited market for labour and for local produce—and, unlike their predecessors, they paid for it. The two southern
vilayets
of Baghdad and Basra were enjoying a level of prosperity unknown under the Ottoman Empire.

Only Gertrude amongst the Baghdad staff was able to identify the multitude of races and creeds in the areas north, east, and west of Mosul. In the mountains, Arab tribes gave way to Kurdish, while west towards the desert were the Yazidis—devil-worshippers—a strange sect of whom Gertrude was particularly fond. Their sheikhs had the singular ability to pick up vipers, and their diviners were reputed to forecast the future. “The Devil Worshippers are tractable and amenable, though of loose morals,” she had written on her encounters with them, noting that in 1915 they had given shelter to a number of Armenian refugees. As well as the Kurdish tribes, there were a number of Christian sects of which the foremost were the Chaldeans, Jacobites, Nestorians, and Turkomans, who claimed descent from Tamerlane. On the left bank of the Tigris
there lived, amongst a variety of bizarre groupings, Shabak and Sarli, the possessors of a secret faith; the Ali-Ilahis, the Tai, and a Jewish community. The pre-eminent Arab tribe were the Anazeh's hereditary enemies, the Shammar, in the pay of the Turkish army and ready to attack convoys, blow up canal heads, raid, and loot whatever they could find.

So carefully put together and administered, so successful in its occupation until the end of the war, the British government of Mesopotamia was about to be undermined by interminable delays while it waited for decisions not only on its future in Iraq, but, more fundamentally, on where the borders of Iraq were to be. Only when the victors assembled to settle the peace could anyone lay the ground for the people of Iraq to govern themselves with a firm prospect of independence. Without that prospect, many strands of minority dissent, often fomented by the Turks, would grow into outright revolt, threatening all the achievements of the previous three years. As Gertrude would write in 1920:

The underlying truth of all criticism—and it's what makes the critics so difficult to answer—[was] that we had promised self-governing institutions, and not only made no step towards them but were busily setting up something quite different. One of the [news]papers says, quite rightly, that we had promised an Arab government with British advisers, and had set up a British government with Arab advisers. That's a perfectly fair statement.

In September 1918, Cox, this most able of administrators, had been sent from Baghdad to Teheran. At this most explosive moment in the history of Iraq she was shackled to his former deputy A. T. Wilson as Acting Civil Commissioner, a boss whose high-handed tactics, punitive retaliation against dissidents, and preference for imperialist policies had brought home to her over the last twenty-four months the appalling truth: he had no sympathy for the policy of self-determination, and would do his best to undermine and prevent it. Where was Gertrude's dream now?

I
t was the astute T. E. Lawrence who noted that one of Gertrude's failings was a propensity to admire the people that she liked, only to disparage them later when she had fallen out with them. She had so far enjoyed a reasonably good working relationship with A. T. Wilson, both under the delicate handling of the fair-minded Cox. While he was the deputy, A.T. had conducted the day-to-day running and development of government, and she had been complementary to him in securing the commitment of the locals and in moulding the new regime to the realities on the ground. But A.T. always wanted to run his own show. He did not involve her in policy as Cox had done, nor did he consult her before making decisions. Furthermore, their attitudes towards the Arabs could not have been more different. A.T. dealt with their representations brusquely and paid their leaders, however distinguished, scant respect. She found this worse than embarrassing and, far more seriously, found herself radically differing with her “colonial dinosaur” of a chief (as Lawrence had branded him). The very words “self-determination” outraged A.T., whereas the principle was enshrined in Gertrude's heart: “. . . I might be able to help to keep things straight—if they'll let me . . . We are having rather a windy time over self-determination . . . I wish very much that Sir Percy were here,” she wrote in January 1919.

The First World War was over at last, and Gertrude, recovering from another bout of malaria, allowed herself some amusement of a characteristic
variety. She steamed down the Tigris on a luxurious boat belonging to one of the generals, reading novels; attended a lecture on Abbasid history; and rode across the desert to view a ruin, escorted by thirty-two horsemen of the Bani Tamim tribe. She also flew in a plane for the first time: “For the first quarter of an hour I thought it the most alarming thing I had ever done . . . It was a windy day, the aeroplane wobbled a good deal. However, I presently became accustomed to it and was much interested and excited. I shall go up whenever I have an opportunity so as to grow quite used to it.”

For the last year Hugh and Florence had been urging Gertrude to come home for a holiday, for the sake of her health, and avoid the scorching Baghdad summer. She had replied frequently that she could not leave while she was so badly needed. Now, excluded from most of his important meetings, she was forced to face the fact that A.T. did not depend on her. However, she told her family, she was needed by the Arabs, perhaps more than ever. Hugh wrote that he might, then, come to visit her in Baghdad, and the idea of showing him her world gave her enormous pleasure. As the time of Hugh's visit came nearer, duty intervened in the shape of the Paris Peace Conference. It became clear that A.T. wanted her to cover the conference before his own arrival, to attend meetings, represent Mesopotamian interests, and keep him informed. It was settled that Gertrude would go to England first, then on to Paris, where Hugh would join her for a few days. She could hardly bear the thought of returning to London. She still felt no desire at all to see most of her friends or to visit her old haunts: everything would remind her of Dick Doughty-Wylie, the poignancy of their last days together, and the misery that followed. She knew her true friends would understand. She wrote to one of these, Lord Ullswater's daughter Milly Lowther, that she was one of the few she wanted to meet. She had become close to Milly at the Wounded and Missing Office in London, after Doughty-Wylie's death. “When I come back I shall want your help and understanding so much. It will be so difficult to pick up life in England; I dread it. You must give me a hand as you did before.”

Her father understood her feelings completely, and hatched a plan that would neatly avoid the social obligations of London. Much of her time there, he knew, would be taken up with clothes shopping. When they had spent the few days in Paris, why didn't the two of them then go off by themselves for a motor tour through Belgium and France, and by
sea to Algiers? She was immensely relieved and began to look forward to the trip. But what she wanted most, she wrote, was to see the family; and after that, a Yorkshire leg of mutton.

From Paris in March 1919, she wrote to Florence what it meant to her to be with Hugh again: “I can't tell you what it has been like to have him for these last two days. He has been more wonderfully dear than words can say, and in such good spirits, looking so well. I can scarcely believe that three years of war have passed over his head since I saw him.”

Father and daughter were always able to pick up where they left off, and time had done nothing to diminish their affection for each other. They had an ecstatic reunion, after which they joined up with Domnul and lunched with Lord Robert Cecil—her former chief at the Wounded and Missing Office. After a few days, Hugh departed and Gertrude got down to work.

In March 1918 revolutionary Russia, under the new Bolshevik government, had signed a treaty with Germany leaving the Allies—France, Britain, Italy, and America—to continue the war on the front in Western Europe. The British had continued to push the Turks northwards out of Arabia, hoping again to start a new front moving north-west through Austria, to strike Germany at its undefended southern border—a hope that had been abandoned after the Dardanelles disaster of 1915. At first freed from the conflict with Russia, Germany was able to concentrate its efforts on these fronts, and launched six months of furious attacks against the Allies' trenches running all the way from the North Sea coast in Belgium to the Swiss border in the south. The Allies had held on until the German army was exhausted, running out of equipment, boots, and even food. By August, German morale was sinking. The British were assembling a secret army of one hundred thousand fresh infantry, spearheaded by a hundred of Churchill's newly invented tanks. They punched through the weak centre of the German lines, rooting the troops out of their trenches and following them miles into territory that four years of fighting had failed to gain. Immediately the French in the north and the Americans in the south hammered away at the German trenches while the British advanced in the centre. The German commander-in-chief recognized defeat, and within days the Germans had sued for peace.

Almost within moments of the peace prospect, the Allies began to wrangle amongst themselves; wrangling which would hinder Gertrude for three more years and bring her mission in Arabia almost to disaster. At first the Allies could not agree whether to pursue the Germans all the way to Berlin, which would leave the country devastated but having learnt a lesson never to be forgotten. Marshal Foch, the French overall Allied commander, declared that more death and destruction would benefit nobody. The Allies produced a document of armistice, by which the Germans admitted defeat and would be forced to accept the total demobilization of their army and the handing over of their navy to the British. The Germans signed on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, and the firing stopped. Meanwhile, the British army had reached the Turkish border. The Turks had fled Arabia, but the trouble they caused would continue.

The Armistice ended hostilities, but the Allied armies remained poised to fight again if Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey would not submit to terms for a permanent peace treaty. What were the terms to be? America wanted repayment of the money it had lent to England and to France, and Britain wanted repayment of its loans to France, but both the European countries were bankrupt. France wanted security for evermore from German attack, and it wanted the return of its German-held territory in Alsace Lorraine. Italy, after grim battles fought on behalf of the Allies, demanded more territory carved from the defeated nations. Britain wanted a secure empire, with a navy once more in control of the oceans. Everyone wanted a Germany humbled, disarmed, and paying through the nose, although nobody could reach an acceptable figure.

These problems were enough in themselves to fully occupy the exhausted leaders arriving in Paris in the New Year of 1919. The three major contenders at the Conference were President Wilson for America, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and the elderly but tough-minded Prime Minister Clemenceau of France. Beyond the grasp of these men, but part of their responsibilities, were the futures of all those peoples who now had no government, no defined boundaries, and no recognized identity as nations. With the collapse of such immense empires as the German, Russian, Austrian, and Turkish, hundreds of their subject tribes and races in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East were left with no administration, no police, army, or money.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was assembled to resolve all of these issues, even if the problems began with the resolution of a language in which to conduct the discussions. Twenty-seven Allied countries were invited. Every nation affected by the war was offered the chance to stake its case against the defeated enemy, and for its own place in the postwar world. Powerful nations like Britain and America arrived early, before the end of 1918, taking over enormous hotels for their representatives. Small ones from the other side of the world took months to arrive. Amongst them were peoples of which the great Allied powers had hardly heard, including several from Arabia and the now-abandoned Turkish Empire for whose future Gertrude would battle.

President Wilson arrived in Paris to declare his fourteen points of principle for the future relations between nations, including the right of every nation to choose its own form of government. Colonial rule was to be consigned to history. A new model was needed to enable powers such as Great Britain and France to teach the new nations to establish good government, with financial aid and trained administrators preparing the way for independence. The answer would be the “mandate,” a legal document binding the chosen established country to govern and assist the fledgling nation until it was ready to stand alone, perhaps twenty years hence. In return, the supervising power gained immediate trading opportunities and strong diplomatic influence in the region of its protectorate.