Desert Queen (33 page)

She had waited impatiently for this moment; after more than a year of marking time, filling her hours with bureaucratic busy work, she could at last return to the part of the world that welcomed her as a Person. What’s more, she would go not as an observer, but as a participant, not as a bothersome traveler but as a knowledgeable practitioner, indispensible now to the same British officials who had tried so hard two years before to prevent her journey to Arabia. Her traveling expenses would be paid, and she would be given a billeting allowance. “I think I’m justified in accepting that, don’t you?” she asked her father.

In the house on Sloane Street, her maid Marie packed a steamer trunk with tunics and peg-topped skirts, satin corsets, knickers, petticoats and silk stockings, adding capes and coats for the cool Cairo evenings and parasols to protect her from the hot Egyptian sun. A week later, clothing, books and toiletries in order, Gertrude said farewell to Florence and Hugh, not knowing how long she would be away nor how far she would travel beyond Egypt. That was enough.

Her spirits high, she boarded the
SS Arabia
on November 19, 1915, and set sail from Southampton. Storms raged all the way from Marseilles to Port Said; the rough seas pitched the boat day and night, tossing it dangerously, turning most of the passengers green with seasickness. It was a “horrible journey,” Gertrude confessed, but she survived “triumphantly.” Five days later, on the night of Thursday, November 25, 1915, the ship reached Port Said. The following afternoon Gertrude arrived in Cairo, invigorated by the sight of her mentor, David Hogarth. By his side was his subordinate, the fair-haired, blue-eyed young man named T. E. Lawrence.

“G
erty!” the young man exclaimed.

“My dear boy!” Gertrude called in return. Lawrence had come—sloppily dressed, as always, his belt missing and his buttons unpolished—to meet her carriage and welcome her to Egypt. A ride on the dusty streets took them through a blend of East and West—a Levantine atmosphere thriving with Bedouin Arabs, Turkish traders, Jewish merchants, Sudanese servants, British officials and soldiers recalled from Gallipoli—until they reached the fashionable quarter of Ismailiya and the Hotel Continental, where Hogarth and Lawrence were billeted.

Gertrude surveyed the luxurious gardens and sumptuous surroundings, a whimsical combination of English gingerbread and Oriental elegance, and glanced at the guests sipping mint tea on the swag-covered verandahs. Egyptian bellboys in long nightshirts took her luggage, and she settled into her room, a well-appointed suite with modern fittings, private bath and covered balcony. After changing into a gown, she joined the two men and went down to her first dinner as a Staff Officer on the Military Intelligence team. There was much to catch up on, and as Gertrude sipped her Turkish coffee and puffed on a cigarette, she filled them in on news from home while Hogarth outlined the work to be done and Lawrence amused her with gossip.

When morning came, she marched to the telegraph desk to pen an urgent message home: send at once my new white skirt and purple chiffon evening gown, she wrote. That done, she was keen to start her day.

The local office of Military Intelligence, soon to be renamed the Arab Bureau, was installed in three rooms at the nearby Savoy. In peacetime, the hotel rivaled Shepheard’s as a stylish meeting spot for women as well as men, but now, as headquarters for the War Office, it had become a bastion of uniformed British males—khaki-clothed officers in high suede boots, swatting the air with fly sticks. Gertrude marched through the Savoy, tall and erect, her head topped with a feathered hat, her confidence overbrimming, but her high spirit was met with a stony reception. “The military people here are much put about how she is to be treated and to how much she is to be admitted,” Hogarth had written to his wife a few days before Gertrude arrived. “I have told them but
she’ll
settle that and they needn’t worry!”

He was right; Gertrude was impervious. Ignoring their suspicions, she stared them down and plunged into work, and after months of severe depression, her old enthusiasm reappeared. She was in her element, surrounded by males, toiling like a schoolgirl and excelling at her assignment. She was no longer a deflated balloon, left on the floor of a party, but a bubble floating higher and higher over the heads of the guests. On November 30, 1915, only a few days after her arrival, she wrote to Florence excitedly, “It’s great fun.” That same day Hogarth sent another letter to his wife: “Gertrude … is beginning to pervade the place.”

I
f there were sidelong glances from the military, there were welcoming smiles from others. Most of the members of the Intelligence staff—“Intrusives,” as they were code-named, for their unorthodox ways—were old acquaintances who had come to Cairo in December 1914 to carry out new jobs: Lawrence, who had been digging at Carchemish, was now making maps and writing geographical reports; Leonard Woolley, another Oxford archaeologist who had worked at Carchemish, was now in charge of propaganda for the press. Several people were her friends from the embassy in Constantinople: Wyndham Deedes was an expert on Turkish affairs and had received her report after the trip to Hayil; George Lloyd, a family friend and financial expert, had provided her years before with her most loyal Armenian servant, Fattuh; the
Times
correspondent Philip Graves, an authority on the Turks, had often invited her to his Constantinople home to dine. Still others she had met on her earliest travels: the brilliant Aubrey Herbert, who spoke at least seven languages, had lunched with her in Japan in 1903 when she was on a round-the-world trip; the pragmatic Mark Sykes, now on a fact-finding mission for the War Office, was the fellow adventurer she had first met in Jerusalem in 1905; the erudite Ronald Storrs had been Oriental Secretary in Egypt, a position he described as “the eyes, ears, interpretation and Intelligence … of the British Agent, and … much more.” In charge of them all was General Gilbert Clayton, a fatherly figure who believed in an Arab revolt. He had been working on the idea since November 1914, when he encouraged the ruler of Asir, near Yemen, to rebel against the Turks.

The office bustled with activity: men rushed about, bells rang and the air was charged with excitement.

O
n the Eastern Front, the war had begun with the battle at Gallipoli. It had been a strategic attempt to stave off the Turks before they could make two serious strikes: one at Egypt and the Suez Canal; the other at Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the nearby oil refineries in Abadan on the Persian Gulf. The interests of Military Intelligence in Cairo had centered, at first, on Gallipoli: on the size and whereabouts of the Turkish army in the Dardanelles, where the regiments were, how large they were, who commanded them and what ammunition they held. But with the British defeat at Gallipoli, the bureau’s focus had soon shifted to Mesopotamia, Arabia and the Gulf.

Success depended upon help from the Arabs. Years earlier, Gertrude had scoffed at the notion of Arab unity and denied the idea of Arab nationalism. But several factors had brought a change in Arab attitudes and, with it, an incipient Arab nationalist movement. The increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire had caused the Sultan to reclaim his role as Caliph, the chief religious leader of the Muslims, threatening the religious leaders in Arabia. Concerned about competition from the Arabs, the Sultan had even exiled the Sharif Hussein, custodian of the holy places in Mecca and Medina and supervisor of the holy pilgrimage, to Constantinople. In addition, the desperate state of the Ottoman economy had resulted in higher taxation and deep inflation for the Arabs, while at the same time the thinly spread Ottoman army, engaged in too many costly wars, had relied on compulsory recruitment of Arabs. In Constantinople the Turkish reformers had forced a “Turkification” of the Ottoman world: Turkish rather than Arabic became the official language, angering the masses throughout the empire who spoke Arabic, the students and scholars who used Arabic as the language of education and the Muslims who considered Arabic the language of Islam. The reformers banned new political and ethnic organizations and shut down existing non-Turkish clubs, causing more resentment and pushing the Arab activists underground. Now that England was at war with the Turks, the Arab nationalists were a potential ally against the Ottomans.

In fact, the Arab tribes were torn between aligning themselves with the Turks (who, though they were unpopular occupiers, were also fellow Muslims) or the British (who represented a new rule but were, unfortunately, Christian infidels). There was even fear that the Arabs might call for a holy war against the British and the French. Nonetheless, if Military Intelligence could find the right Arabs—strong leaders, eager for independence and sympathetic to the British—they could pull off a rebellion against the Turks. The idea had been floating around for a while. In February 1914, a son of the Sharif Hussein of Mecca had arrived in Cairo to pay a call on the British Agent, Lord Kitchener, to test his support for an Arab revolt. Kitchener made no promises, but that same year Gertrude saw the importance of such a revolt when, in September 1914, after her trip to Hayil, she wrote in her official report, “I think we could make it pretty hot for the Turks in the Gulf.”

The key to success was information.

For a while T. E. Lawrence had been assigned the task of collecting data on the Arab tribes. The Intelligence bureau had knowledge of the Arabs of Western Arabia and the Hejaz, where the Sharif Hussein was in control of six hundred thousand members of the Harb confederation; but they had few details on the tribes in Iraq, the Gulf, or the Nejd. Gertrude was a formidable expert, more knowledgeable about the personalities and politics of the Arabs in Northern and Central Arabia than anyone else (and the last European to have visited that region), not to mention—thanks to her six long desert treks—her familiarity with the tribes of Syria and Mesopotamia. As Mr. Lorimer, the British representative in Baghdad, said, he had “never known anyone more in the confidence of the nations” than Gertrude.

Now, seated at a desk in Hogarth’s office, she quickly began to fill in the missing pieces in the files. Within a few weeks she was given an office of her own and took over the tribal work, while Lawrence was “mostly writing notes on railways, & troop movements, & the nature of the country everywhere, & the climate, & the number of horses or camels or sheep or fleas in it … and then drawing maps showing all these things.”

With papers strewn everywhere, her ashtray overflowing, Gertrude worked till seven each night cataloguing the Arab clans. Her talent for detail proved invaluable: she recorded everything she knew about the tribes and the desert, recalling the campsites, the water wells, the railway lines, the topography and the terrain; she noted the tribes’ numbers, their lineage and their sheikhs; she analyzed their personalities and assessed their political alliances. There were some who were feuding and others who were rivalrous friends; some who could be trusted and others who could not; some whose strength was waning and others who were on the rise. There were some, she wrote, like the weakened Ibn Rashid, whose territory ran close to the Mesopotamian borders, whose purse was filled by the Turks and whose headquarters, Hayil, had once been the center of operations for Ottoman influence in Arabia. And there were Ibn Saud and the Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who were now “the most powerful chiefs in Arabia,” but whose authority over the desert was personal and fleeting, never permanent, and whose regard for each other was filled “with jealous anxiety.”