Desert Queen (38 page)

Word had come in, she notified Hogarth, that there was a good deal of disaffection among the Arabs in the Turkish army, but frustrating as it was, until the situation at Kut was resolved, she was not allowed to travel north to investigate. Nevertheless, she had developed her own network of Arabs, who kept her informed. The chaperones she had been ordered to use had long been shucked, and she fluttered about like a young bird in spring from one native house to another. She would report back to Hogarth soon: “I am going out to Zubair tomorrow to see the Shaikhs and other notables.”

D
riving through mud and water, Gertrude reached the hard sand that marked the start of the desert. Eight miles to the west was the oasis of Zubair—once, before the Euphrates had changed its course, the original city of Basrah, home of Sindbad the Sailor and burial place of Ali the Barmecide—now, “the funniest little desert place, something like Hayil,” she described it. With the help of the local political officer, she found sleeping quarters in the post office and furnished the mud-floored room with the camp bed, chair and bath she had brought along.

The village had served for centuries as a marketplace for the Bedouin. Caravans coming up from Arabia poured into town, and purchasing agents of Ibn Rashid bargained in the shops for clothing, household utensils, rifles, corn, oil, coffee, tea and sugar, much of it to be delivered to the Turks. Tribal gossip buzzed through the air like worker bees in a rose garden.

The Sheikh of Zubair, who hosted visiting travelers at his coffee hearth, was the local authority on the politics of the desert. A wealthy man who counted his riches in date palm plantations, herds of camel and the tribute he taxed his tribe, he had made his peace with the British and now invited Gertrude several times to dine with him. She visited his palace, passing through the low-arched doorway leading to the courtyard, taking her place beside the sheikh on one of the long divans placed on the Persian rugs that covered the floors of the verandahs. Brown-hooded falcons lined the room, and the bearded sheikh, cloaked in a gold-embroidered robe, sat in elegant style. Over a Bedouin meal of whole roasted lamb, piles of rice, vegetables wrapped in cabbage leaves, chicken and hard-boiled eggs, he served the honored guest the eye of the lamb and fed her the latest news. She learned of the whereabouts of the Turkish troops and heard of the activities of a large group from Hayil who, turning their backs on Ibn Rashid, had brought their camels and tents close to the Mesopotamian border.

Even before Gertrude arrived in Basrah, the sheikh had been used as a medium through which to transfer information. Percy Cox had asked him to deliver a message to Ibn Rashid, “holding out a hand of friendship,” as Gertrude described it in a letter to Lawrence, “warning him at the same time that he will in the future find it very uncomfortable to be on anything but good terms with us, since we shall control his market towns. This was sent before I came,” she noted, “by means of a small Shammar caravan which dropped in at Zubair.”

Now on this visit, she heard more about Ibn Rashid. “His intentions are … doubtful,” she reported later, “but I don’t think he is in a position to do much harm. But of one thing there is no doubt: we should be much more at ease if we were on terms with him.” Gertrude wanted to send the young ruler a personal letter. As she explained to Hogarth, it was time to make peace between Ibn Rashid and Ibn Saud. The only problem was the dilemma of supplying arms. “We can’t give arms to both of them, that would be manifestly absurd; nor can we give arms to one only, if we are friends with both; which brings us back to the point I always wish to reach, and leaves us with no alternative but to give arms to none.”

A
fter a courtesy call on Sheikh Ibrahim’s harem, where the unveiled, tattooed women smoked
narghiles
and entertained her with coffee and conversation, Gertrude left the clean dry air of the desert to return to Headquarters and her mail. Two letters from her parents had arrived, but one of her father’s was lost. “I fear his of March 23 went down in the
Sussex
,” she wrote to Florence, “and also, I suspect, the clothes you sent me! Better luck next time.”

A beastly, steamy heat permeated Basrah. Gertrude sat at her desk, enclosed in her room, the doors and windows tightly shuttered to ward off the sun, the blades of the electric fan spinning. It was three years since she had seen the daffodils coming up in springtime at Rounton. “Oh I wonder how my dear family is and wish for news,” she wrote with an almost audible sigh. “One falls into a kind of coma when one is so far away and wakes up with a jump at intervals.”

It was not the heat that bothered her, she assured them, but her clothes. Unlike her fellow officers, who could requisition a clean new uniform at any time, she had no one to make her new dresses. Her things were beginning to fall apart. “One wears almost nothing, fortunately, still it’s all the more essential that that nothing should not be in holes.” And she was still without friends, as neither Aubrey nor Lawrence had returned: “They go up river and disappear. I long for someone I know to come down so that I may hear what is happening for we get very little news.”

W
ord of the siege at Kut had already reached England, and in the mail from home her father had included an article from the
Economist
, blaming the Government of India for the military disaster. Gertrude may not have known that while the taking of Basrah was carried out upon orders from London, the premature thrust toward Baghdad had been General Townshend’s initiative, agreed to only reluctantly by London. The
Economist
article triggered a furious response. Aware that Hugh would pass on her letter to influential friends at Whitehall, she took out pen and paper and, noting that the India Government was not alone in deserving blame for the military disaster, she answered angrily:

Politically, too, we rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. We treated Mesop. as if it were an isolated unit, instead of which it is part of Arabia, its politics indissolubly connected with the great and far reaching Arab question, which presents, indeed, different facets as you regard it from different aspects, and is yet always one and the same indivisible block. The coordinating of Arabian politics and the creation of an Arabian policy should have been done at home—it could only have been done successfully at home. There was no one to do it, no one who had ever thought of it, and it was left to our people in Egypt to thrash out, in the face of strenuous opposition from India and London, some sort of wide scheme, which will, I am persuaded, ultimately form the basis of our relations with the Arabs. And up to this moment, the battle against the ignorance and indifference of the people at home is waging—and is not yet won. The Milton sonnet is so often in my mind—there’s no one to lead. Swollen with wind and the rank mists we draw—

Well that’s enough of politics. But when people talk of our muddling through it throws me into a passion. Muddle through! why yes, so we do—wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.

More than twenty-three thousand British relief soldiers had been killed by the time (two days before she composed her letter) that General Townshend met with the head of the Turkish forces and proposed that Lawrence and Herbert be allowed to speak with General Khalil. The offer was denounced with a flat refusal. Instead, the Turks insisted, the British soldiers must immediately abandon Kut and surrender. It was on April 29, 1916, that the radio operator at Kut sent his final message of goodbye: more than thirteen thousand British and Indian troops were taken prisoner and sent on a march to almost certain death. The fall of Kut was one of the worst defeats in British history.

Unaware of the surrender, Lawrence, Herbert and Colonel Beach left their trenches and, holding a white flag, edged their way a couple of hundred yards toward the Turkish side. An enemy soldier was sent to find out what they wanted, and led them, blindfolded, to General Khalil. Hearing that their countrymen had surrendered, the surprised threesome tried for an exchange of prisoners, but an agreement had already been made to trade the British sick and wounded for Turkish prisoners of war. Except for a pleasant Turkish dinner, the whole event was a fiasco. Newspapers around the world reported the humiliating story of the failed attempt at bribery, and by May 8, Lawrence and Beach were back in Basrah.

O
utraged by what he had seen at Kut, Lawrence sent Cairo a scathing report. Iraq was a “blunderland,” he announced, except for Sir Percy Cox, who was “delightful,” and Miss Bell, who he thought was first rate. But with Gertrude needed in Cairo, he had to find someone to take over her job as Basrah representative of the Arab Bureau. He approached Sir Percy Cox, but the Chief Political Officer handed the matter over to Colonel Beach.

Lawrence persisted, explaining to Cox that the Arab Bureau was a “Foreign Office affair” and that its representative must be “intimate with the work of the political side.” For the present, he and Cox agreed, Miss Bell would continue to do the tribal and geographical work while they searched for a successor. But it would take at least two people to replace her. “I have a feeling that no one person will be able to supply us with all we want,” Lawrence wrote. Only she had the female charm to extract what was needed: “I think Miss Bell, by her sex and energy and lack of self-consciousness, is peculiarly likely to persuade Political Officers to send her what she asks for.”

Nevertheless, competition for the job was growing. George Lloyd had been sent out from Cairo, and India had sent out their own choice. But the former spoke no Arabic, and the latter had never before been in the East. On May 14 Gertrude wrote to Hogarth, emphasizing the importance of being fluent in Arabic. “Even the information which comes to us from the Political Office,” she said, required an understanding of the language; “clan names, peoples’ names, tribe names, spelt with so many variations that you are put to it to find out that two almost wholly different words are really the same. And the actual intercourse with the natives (of whom I now see a good deal) necessitates Arabic.”