Gertrude Bell (55 page)

If he thought this would crush her, he was wrong. She was not prepared to take it lying down. After all, she was pursuing the steps to self-determination that had been sanctioned, while A.T. was ignoring them as far as it was possible to do so. In April, in the teeth of the nationalist uprisings, he had executed a volte face and attempted to diffuse tension by drawing up a provisional constitution for Iraq, including a council of state composed of British and Arab members with an Arab president, to be chosen by the High Commissioner, and a legislative assembly chosen by election. It had been too little and too late.

Smartly, she sent back her own riposte to Montagu (she did not take a copy, but sent her father a duplicate from memory):

. . . Colonel Wilson gives me every opportunity of telling him any considerations which may occur to me. I am also wholly in agreement with policy which has been pursued since April. You are sufficiently aware of my general
attitude towards the Arab question to know that I regret it was not embarked on earlier. To express this view in public would now however be valueless and even harmful. With regard to correspondence, except for private letters to my Father I cannot recall letters on political subjects to unofficial persons which have not been previously submitted to Colonel Wilson. Your remarks are however a useful warning.

A.T. followed Montagu's telegram, of which he would have been sent a copy, with a stiff inter-office note:

Miss Bell. When Sir Percy Cox passed through he asked—
à propos
of events earlier in the year—whether my relations with you were happier. I said that I could not say they were—that your divergence of opinion was marked and a matter of public knowledge and indeed of comment . . . I said the position would be untenable but for the fact that I was hoping before long to be relieved. You have always maintained your right as an individual to write what you like—to whom you like . . . but I do not like their being written and the fact that I am cognizant of them must not be held to include approval. Otherwise I have no comment to make.

It was the breaking point. When they talked the following day, Gertrude reminded him that it had been inevitable that people knew their opinions diverged, because she had always said so—and to A.T. himself first and foremost. He told her that he objected to any private communications with the India Office, and she replied that she thought it preposterous but would comply with his wishes—“On this we shook hands warmly—you can't shake hands anything but warmly when the temperature is 115.”

In spite of all, A.T. had been a good organizer, and the day-to-day administration had continued to build on the successes detailed by Gertrude in the White Paper. The country had become prosperous, as exemplified by a rise in taxes. The income of the administration had risen by 300 per cent in the three years before 1920. The fact that the tax revenue had balanced out with expenditure was all-important. Churchill's administrative task as Secretary of State for the Colonies was to cut by half the £37 million currently spent ruling Palestine, Iraq, and Arabia, and to find an affordable system of government for the Middle
East. In Iraq he would try to reduce the £20 million annual military expenditure to £7 million. He was soon to report to Lloyd George on the absolute need of “appeasing” Arab sentiment—“Otherwise we should certainly be forced by expense of the garrisons to evacuate the territories which each country had gained in the war.” Every project in the Middle East would now be subject to reducing military expenditure.

The night before A.T. left, at the end of September, he went into Gertrude's office to say goodbye. It was an emotional moment in which the generous impulses of both came to the fore. She rose and moved towards him, saying that she was feeling more deeply discouraged than she could say, and regretting acutely that they had not made a better job of their relations. When he replied that he had come to apologize, she interrupted him—it was as much her fault as his, she said. She then paid him her greatest compliment, inviting him to call on her father and mother in London; he undertook to do so.

A.T.'s official career was soon over. He married a young widow and took up a post with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company as manager of their operations in the Middle East. A private letter he was to write to a friend from Muhammarah, in the Persian Gulf, a couple of years later shows that his anger encompassed Cox as well as Gertrude. He accuses his old boss of dishonesty and incompetence, of “promising all things and doing nothing,” and calls the Mesopotamia of 1922 “pitiful: no guidance—no decision.” He puts his own spin on events: “I rejoice daily that I took the plunge and left with colours flying, and that so many of the old gang left with me—all who could afford it . . . No-one trusts Cox now—and his reputation has slumped dreadfully.”

On 11 October 1920, Sir Percy returned to Baghdad. The station, beflagged and carpeted, was crowded with the great and the good, Arab and British. Guns were fired, the road was lined with well-wishers, and Sir Percy, in white and gold uniform, stood at the salute while the band played “God Save the King.”

After the welcoming address, he replied with a speech in Arabic. He had come by order of HMG, he announced, to enter into counsel with the people of Iraq for the purpose of setting up an Arab government under the supervision of Britain. He asked the people to cooperate with him in establishing settled conditions, so that he might proceed at once with his task. It was a new beginning, and as Gertrude made her curtsey
to him she struggled not to let her emotions show. In her letter home of a few days later she wrote:

It is quite impossible to tell you the relief and comfort it is to serve under somebody in whose judgment one has complete confidence. To the extraordinarily difficult task which lies before him he brings a single-eyed desire to act in the interests of the people of the country . . .

Oh, if we can pull this thing off; rope together the young hotheads and the Shiah obscurantists, enthusiasts, polished old statesmen and scholars—if we can make them work together and find their own salvation for themselves, what a fine thing it would be. I see visions and dream dreams . . .

I
n May 1885, when Gertrude was sixteen, a baby was born in his father's castle at Taif in the deserts of the Hejaz, and named after the flashing downstroke of the sword: Faisal. What were the odds that a schoolgirl from Yorkshire and a son of the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca should ever meet, or that their lives would become interwoven?

Faisal was the third son of Sharif Hussain ibn Ali, continuing the bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima, who married Ali of the Hashemite clan, and her elder son Hassan. Sharif was the family's honorific title. The Prophet's family had held temporal rule in Mecca for the last nine hundred years. Faisal was twice an aristocrat. His mother, Hussain's first wife, Abdiyah Hanem, was also his father's cousin and so also sprang from the Prophet's bloodline. Following hallowed tradition, Faisal was taken from his mother at seven days old and carried off to the desert, to be brought up by a Bedouin tribe until he was seven years old. He never saw his mother again. She died when he was three. Gertrude had lost her mother at the same age.

Faisal, like his older brothers, Ali and Abdullah, lived in a black tent as a child of the tribe, learning to fight by taking part in rough games, which left him with a scar on his head and, once, a broken arm.

The Hashemites were regarded by the psychopathic Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid, with a mixture of suspicion and respect. Lest these Sharifs should become pre-eminent, he periodically rounded up the most powerful and ordered them to Constantinople, where they
were obliged to live in “honourable captivity” on frugal incomes, under the constant scrutiny of the Sultan's sinister phalanx of spies, guards, and black eunuchs. This was the fate of Sharif Hussain, who would remain there with his family for eighteen long years.

In 1891, when he was six, Faisal was parted from his Bedouin foster family a year early, and taken with his brothers to join his father in a house on the Golden Horn in Constantinople. The household included the thirty-two women of his father's harem, with their suites and slaves.

Hussain was a domestic despot, determined that his sons should never enjoy comforts or luxuries. He held several traditional Ottoman posts, but his income remained modest. The household, large as it was, could afford meat only once a week. Discipline was severe: above all, the sons had to learn self-control. The
falaka
was still being used, a rope with which a child's feet were bound together and a cane for beating his soles. On the other hand, Hussain made sure that his sons were given a sound education: he employed tutors, four to begin with and many more as they grew up. The political atmosphere was highly charged and life was full of danger. The city was rife with the plotting of secret societies, and the Sultan, responsible for the deaths of perhaps half a million people over the course of his lifetime, had a nasty habit of ensuring that his victims were dead by getting their heads boxed up and delivered to him.

At eighteen, in 1903, Faisal began to learn the strategy and tactics of the Turkish army, which was trained on German lines and composed of both Turks and Arabs. As Gertrude reached Japan on her world tour with Hugo, Faisal was being sent out into the desert to patrol the sands with the Turkish camel corps. A few years later, he and Abdullah were called back to Constantinople. Hussain had been instructed by the Turks to quell a rebellion of Arab tribesmen in the southern region of Asir. Abdullah commanded the Turkish troops and Faisal led the Arab camel cavalry. They fought a desperate battle at Quz Abu-al-Ir, only to retreat with seventy survivors out of a total of three thousand. A fortnight later, they attacked the rebels again. The battle lasted two days and a night. The rebels broke up, but it was a hollow victory. The Sharif's army had been reduced from seven thousand to seventeen hundred men. Faisal and Abdullah could not prevent the Turkish troops from burning villages and killing innocent people. Nor could they ever forget the mutilation of the dead Arab rebels. Complaints to their Turkish overlords met with disdain.
It was then that Sharif Hussain determined to raise a revolt against the Turks: it would become known as the Arab Revolt.

The brothers were given positions in the Turkish parliament: the Amir Abdullah represented the constituency of Mecca, and the Amir Faisal that of Jidda. The fortunes of the family changed again with the revolution of the Young Turks and their Committee of Union and Progress, whose aim was ruthless modernization of the state. In the year 1909, Abdul Hamid was deposed, a new Sultan and Caliph
^*
was put in place, and Hussain gained the important title of Amir of Mecca, prince of the most holy city of Islam. His primary duties were the custody of the holy places in the Hejaz and the supervision of the Haj, the annual pilgrimage. He returned to his palaces in Mecca and Taif, ordering his sons to maintain their posts in Constantinople and to keep him informed of every change of political opinion.

The suggestion that the Arabs and the British might become allies had first been made before the war, when Lord Kitchener wrote to Hussain. Abdullah, as his father's envoy, travelled to and from Mecca and Constantinople, and would stop at Cairo to talk to Lord Kitchener and his Oriental Secretary Ronald Storrs. Matters came to a head with the outbreak of the war, when the Turks demanded that Hussain, as the Amir of Mecca, declare a Jihad of all Muslims against the Christians. Hussain, pious, courageous, and autocratic, refused to do so, using as an excuse that the Turks themselves had a Christian ally, Germany.

Faisal now took on a most dangerous role. As a spy for his father, he was sent to Damascus secretly to propose a military uprising against the Turks in Syria. Meanwhile, his eldest brother Ali was raising Arab troops in the Hejaz in response to Turkish demands, on the pretext that they were to aid the Turks. Faisal and his father communicated in covert ways, by means of trusted retainers who carried messages to and fro in sword-hilts, in cakes, in the soles of their sandals, or written in invisible ink on the wrapping paper of gifts. Faisal's friends in the secret societies—the Arab nationalist political “clubs”—could have betrayed him at any time, and he was particularly vulnerable as he was obliged when in Damascus to live as the guest of one General Mehmed Jemal Pasha.
This Turk expected Faisal, as an officer in the Turkish army, to lead the army that his brother Ali was raising in the Hejaz. But Jemal Pasha was suspicious of Faisal because his father had refused to declare Jihad against Turkey's enemies, and continually put him to the test. He would send for Faisal, and make him watch the public hangings of scores of his Syrian friends. These brave men went to their deaths without making any appeal to Faisal, who needed all his training in self-control not to betray his disgust and anger. As Lawrence wrote in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, “Only once did he burst out that these executions would cost Jemal all that he was trying to avoid; and it took the intercessions of his Constantinople friends, chief men in Turkey, to save him.” In the meantime, the Turkish Prime Minister, responding to Hussain's terms for Arab cooperation, declared that if he wanted to see Faisal again he must tell his son to join the troops in the Hejaz.