Gertrude Bell (63 page)

. . . and here are Faisal's steps.

^*
According to Ronald Bodley, a descendant of Gertrude's who wrote a biography of her in 1940.

G
ertrude, at fifty-three, found herself drawn more and more to the King's company. Faisal, thirty-six, was a most charming companion, affectionate with those he trusted, and exercising a persuasive influence on everyone around him. The Oriental Secretary and the King shared a sense of the ridiculous which they could enjoy in private, so that aides busy elsewhere in the house would sometimes be curious to know what was causing the laughter they could hear through closed doors.

For his part, the King saw in Gertrude an extraordinary person, a formidable ally, impeccably well informed, and with a personal history of adventure that he—as an Arab man—could hardly believe. A woman of quick movements and quick understanding, her conversation would catch fire as she entered into political debate. Her gaze, as it fixed on her interlocutor, was as penetrating as it had ever been, the occasional snap of irritation more than balanced by the frequent twinkle. In spite of the climate and its effects on her health, she still loved a gallop along the banks of the Tigris in the early morning mists, and to join him in the occasional all-day partridge shoot—dressed in breeches with brown leather knee boots and a tweed tunic—and swim in the river in the evenings.

The American journalist Marguerite Harrison, interviewing her in Baghdad for the
New York Times
in 1923, had a rare opportunity to see Gertrude at her office:

I was ushered into a small room with a high ceiling and long French windows facing the river. It was the untidiest room I had ever seen, chairs, tables and sofas being littered with documents, maps, pamphlets and papers in English, French and Arabic. At a desk piled high with documents that had overflowed on to the carpet sat a slender woman in a smart sports frock of knitted silk, pale tan in colour. As she rose, I noticed that her figure was still willowy and graceful. Her delicate oval face with its firm mouth and chin and steel-blue eyes, and with its aureole of soft grey hair, was the face of a “grande dame.” There was nothing of the weather-beaten explorer in her looks or bearing. “Paris frock, Mayfair manners.” And this was the woman who had made sheikhs tremble!

Even now, she was without fear. One morning, as she was breakfasting with Haji Naji in his summer-house, a dervish strode in with an iron staff and rudely demanded to be treated as a guest. Haji Naji told him to go. Looking threateningly at Gertrude, he said that he had as much right as she to be there. He then sat down in the entrance, declared, “I rely on God,” and began to read in a loud voice from the Koran. Neither Haji Naji, his son, nor the servants could move him, so Gertrude told the dervish, “God's a long way off and the police are very near,” snatched up his iron staff, and struck him with it. He left.

Faisal and Gertrude together bent their hearts and minds to the well-being of the new country they had established, and to an ultimate ideal of a wider Arab independence. Sir Percy Cox would soon be retiring, to be replaced by the one-time chief of the Revenue Department, Sir Henry Dobbs; Gertrude would remain in Baghdad, available to give official or unofficial help and advice. This period of Faisal's and Gertrude's lives was one of great satisfaction and excitement to both, and brought them together in the close confidence of true friends. She was happy and fulfilled in her work:

I'm acutely conscious of how much life has, after all, given me. I've gone back now, after many years to the old feeling of joy in existence, and I'm happy in feeling that I've got the love and confidence of a whole nation. It mayn't be the intimate happiness which I've missed, but it's a very wonderful and absorbing thing—almost too absorbing perhaps.

How close, how confident, was not revealed until after Gertrude's death, and then only in a modest British journal,
Everybody's Weekly
, which had the bright idea of obtaining an interview about her with the King. The editor chose to entitle the feature “Secrets of Great White Woman of the Desert Which Were Not Revealed in Her Book.” How Gertrude would have hated that! However sensational or over-romantic the language—no doubt a paraphrase of Faisal's answers, edited as befitted a magazine for housewives, and published complete with misspellings—the content to which the King gave his name contains some extraordinary assertions.

Faisal began:

Gertrude Bell is a name that is written indelibly on Arab history—a name which is spoken with awe—like that of Napoleon, Nelson or Mussolini . . . One might say that she was the greatest woman of her time. Without question her claim to greatness is on a footing with women like Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, Madame Curie and others.

Speaking of her passion for adventure and her unerring loyalty to all that was just and good, he went on to say that it was not only Colonel Lawrence who should be credited with bringing about the uprising of the Arab tribes against the Turks. Like Lawrence,

[Gertrude] could play a man's part in the action . . . She ventured alone and disguised into the remotest districts to carry the message of revolt, and when the chiefs seemed to lack the courage to obey the call she inspired them with her own amazing courage . . . I do not think she knew what fear was. Death held no fears for her. No danger or exploit was too great for her to face. Her personal safety was her last consideration.

He describes her facility for disguise, her ability to make herself up as an Arab of any tribe she chose, and so skilfully that it was undetectable.

Once, my men brought me a picturesque looking Arab camel driver, who answered all my questions in the vernacular as though his whole life had been spent in following this humble occupation. After I had questioned the captive and had obtained from him all the information I sought . . . the camel driver owned to being Miss Bell.

He went on:

I think I may reveal now the fact that in one of the critical phases of our history, when some of our men were wavering, the great white woman herself led them in an attack on the Turks. At least once in her strange career she was at the mercy of her enemies and had before her the certainty of a terrible death.

She had been betrayed to the Turks by a treacherous Arab while on the way back from one of her perilous missions into the desert, and she was seized, disguised as an Arab tribesman, by a Turkish patrol . . . She was told she would be put to fiendish torture if she did not reveal the secrets of the men who were at that moment planning to throw off the Turkish yoke. To all threats she remained deaf, and not one word of her secret did her captors learn. Had she faltered, the lives of some of our best chiefs would have been forfeit, but this woman preferred to face torture . . . rather than betray anyone. Happily, she was able to make her escape before her captors had a chance of carrying out their threats . . .

He continued with the story of her escape, which, he said, she had confided only to him. She had slipped out of the Turkish camp in the dead of night, and wandered without guide, water or food for three days and nights, managing to hide from passing bands of marauders. She finally reached safety more dead than alive. “A few days later she was about again, as active as ever, engaged in her great task of inspiring our men to revolt against their oppressors.”

Gertrude had a genius for warfare, Faisal concluded, and on occasion had offered tactical advice of the greatest value to the Arabs. Early in the war, the Turks had put a price on her head: “The price was one that might have tempted the cupidity of men, but such was the esteem in which our people held her that none could be found to denounce her to her enemies.”

Gertrude left no record of these adventures, and if she never revealed them to Sir Percy and Lady Cox, it is perhaps not surprising. It had been the cautious Cox, years before, who had warned her not to attempt the Hayyil journey. And the vision of his Oriental Secretary playing a practical joke on the King by disguising herself as a camel driver might not have amused him. Just as she would omit or slant events in her letters
home, to spare her family anxiety, so she would have avoided harassing them with accounts of her near-fatalities. Perhaps one reason for her lifelong hatred of the press was a fear that these sensational incidents might have been uncovered by their researches, rendering her less effective in her work as a serious administrator, or indeed as a spy.

There is one particularly intriguing possibility: that she was complicit with T. E. Lawrence's attempt in 1916 to buy off the Turkish siege at Kut. At that time she was in Basra, and frustrated by lack of a role, wondering whether to stay or to go. She was desperately anxious about the state of the starving army. One week after Lawrence passed through Basra, en route for Kut, on 16 April, she wrote to her father: “I've suggested that I should go up the Shatt al' Arab with a local man and check the maps and they seem to think it would be a good plan.” Then there was a most unusual gap in her letters home—until the 27th, when she wrote: “Dearest Mother, I missed the mail last week for I was out for a night at a little place on the edge of the desert called Zubair and when I came in I found that the confounded post had gone a day earlier than usual . . . Nothing happens and nothing seems likely to happen at Kut—it's a desperate business.”

With Kut uppermost in Lawrence's mind and in hers, one may speculate that the “vast schemes” they discussed concerned the siege and whether there was any chance of getting the soldiers out. It is not impossible, given the kind of people they were, that they considered the idea of creating a diversion on one side in order to attempt a breakthrough on the other. In his
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence is evasive about what he did in Kut: “our Government . . . sent me to Mesopotamia to see what could be done by indirect means to relieve the beleaguered garrison . . . As a matter of fact it was too late for action, with Kut just dying; and in consequence I did nothing of what it was in my mind and power to do.”

There is a further hint of a similar involvement on Gertrude's part, although without a date or a context. Her old friend Leo Amery, Secretary of State for the Colonies since 1924, wrote in his memoirs
My Political Life
: “In organising Arab forces against the Turks her field of operations had to some extent overlapped with that of Lawrence, and she was credited with a signal victory in the desert in which her protégés defeated Lawrence's and captured all their machine guns.” Lawrence wrote to Elsa after Gertrude's death: “She stood out as the one person who, thinking
clearly, saw the true ultimate goal of our work with the Arabs and, daunted by nothing, worked unsparing of herself toward it.”

After his coronation, the King reorganized his life. He now moved out of the apartment in the Serai and into a palace on the outskirts of Baghdad, a large but simple building with lofty rooms. From a waiting-room, guests were shown into the main salon, its windows framed by velvet curtains, good rugs on the floor, a divan along one wall of the room, and, on winter days, a log fire in the hearth. A couple of sentries guarded the entrance, and except for evenings when Faisal was entertaining, the servant who opened the door also brought in the coffee tray. This room was also Faisal's office, and where he held interviews and conferences with his ministers. In addition, there was his favourite palace, a villa at Harithya, with its steps down to the river, rose garden, and shaded terrace. He had bought the house together with a small farm, which he liked to supervise himself. Further afield, he owned a large farm at Khaniqin near the Persian frontier, where he grew crops according to modern agricultural guidelines. When he learnt to fly, some time later, he would pilot himself to this property.

Gertrude had fought for an independent Arab nation for just as long as Faisal. It had been her inspiration in Cairo, Basra, and Baghdad. She had been a lone voice in the days when she worked for A. T. Wilson; she had sat firm while Britain made repeated threats to withdraw from Iraq; she had nearly despaired during the insurgency; she had watched the years go by as the West procrastinated and the Turks put every obstacle in the way of defining a northern border to Iraq. And still she dreamt of a free Arab government.

By 1921, so much had come right. Cox, a wise and subtle negotiator guided by the same principles, had returned; an Arab king was on the throne; and a respected elder of Baghdad, the Naqib, was Prime Minister. The country was in the hands of a Cabinet chosen from an array of representative Iraqis. National pride in the prospect of self-determination, not yet complete, was to be expected, but agitation for it must follow. Gertrude supported the nationalists in spirit and entertained them in her house, while London insisted on official acceptance of the mandate, without which the British must withdraw from Iraq. And then,
as she repeatedly warned Faisal, he would not be able to hold the allegiance of his people against the Turks and Ibn Saud. Faisal was walking a knife edge. His hold on Syria had been broken by that other mandate that France had secured. He knew that his credibility as an Arab leader depended on being seen to reject the British mandate, with its insistence on subservience to their control. So he refused to acknowledge its existence, and despite all Gertrude's pleas, was ready to listen to every extremist and opportunist who approached him. She wrote home on 25 September: