Desert Queen (43 page)

For people who had never seen a woman accepted so unequivocally by men, it was difficult to believe that sex was not the reason. Indeed, she oozed femininity in her fancy dress. She percolated sociability in her outgoing ways. She even flirted with seductive charm. When one holy man paid her a call, he refused to look at her, an unveiled woman, in the face. It did not prevent him, however, from talking to her about his personal affairs. “And at the end of it,” she wrote home delightedly, “I’ll admit he tipped me a casual wink or two, just enough to know me again.” But it was the power of her mind that won men over.

Six months earlier, Gertrude had sent Fahad Bey ibn Hadhdhal, the Paramount Chief of the Anazeh tribe, a letter beseeching his support for the Arab Revolt and English alliance. As the greatest nomad potentate on the western borders of Iraq, he controlled five thousand rifles and ruled the enormous desert that lay between Syria and the Euphrates River. With Germans, Turks and Syrians skulking across the sands, toting guns, trafficking in supplies, the British needed his help. If he could stop the enemy, they would pay him a generous allowance. But the Turks, still in command in the western desert, were willing to pay him too. The Turks, to whom his family owed some of its wealth, were a known commodity; the British were strangers. To side with the English meant he would be taking an enormous risk. Gertrude had labored carefully over the letter asking for his help.

Now, at the end of May 1917, the seventy-five-year-old sheikh was coming to Baghdad. It was three years since she had last seen him, slight and brown-skinned, seated in his tent, a falcon at his shoulder, a greyhound at his side. Their reunion was tenderly affectionate, “almost compromising,” one of her colleagues teased. In a conference at the Residency with her and Cox, Fahad Bey revealed that it had been the “powerful effect” of Gertrude’s arguments that won him over. With great detail, he described his transformation.

Upon receiving her eloquent plea, the Arab chief said, he summoned his men from the desert and read the letter aloud. Then, turning to his followers, he declared: “My brothers, you have heard what this woman has to say to us. She is only a woman, but she is a mighty and valiant one. Now we all know that Allah has made all women inferior to men. But if the women of the Anglez are like her, the men must be like lions in strength and valor. We had better make peace with them.”

No words could have made her prouder. That women were seen as second to men was a painful given, whether in England or in Iraq. But there was no doubt in her mind that in the eyes of the Arabs, and in the eyes of Cox as well, she was more than the equal of any man.

A
s successful as the alliance was with Fahad Bey, relations with colleagues in Cairo had hit a snag. In accord with the letters between Henry McMahon and the Sharif Hussein, the Arab Bureau had gone ahead with the agreement to back the Sharif’s demands for an Arab kingdom if he led an Arab revolt against the Turks. Ronald Storrs, the Intelligence chief in Egypt, had journeyed to the Hejaz, the Sharif’s headquarters in Arabia, carrying money, weapons and gold watches for the Sharif Hussein. Within days of their meeting, the Arab Revolt had been launched. Triumphantly, the Sharif’s men had captured Mecca and forced the Turks to surrender at Jeddah.

Yet only recently, in April 1917, Sir Percy had learned of a pact signed by Mark Sykes and M. Georges Picot, to divide the Ottoman Middle East between Britain and France. Under the Sykes-Picot accord, actually signed a year before, the Turkish spoils were to be divvied up between the British and the French: a British zone of influence would be created in Mesopotamia, around the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, to include Basrah, Baghdad and Khanaqin; a French zone of influence would be created in Syria, comprising the Syrian coast, including Beirut and the country betweeen Cilicia and the Upper Tigris. The pact also stated that France and Britain were “prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab State or Confederation of Arab States … under the suzerainty of an Arab Chief,” carrying out some of the promises made to the Sharif Hussein. In addition, it was decided that Palestine would be placed under international administration.

A year earlier, in 1916, when David Hogarth was informed of the Sykes-Picot pact, he had written at once to the Director of Intelligence, Captain Hall, urging that no one else be told: “The conclusion of this Agreement is of no immediate service to our Arab policy as pursued here, and will only not be a grave disadvantage if, for some time to come, it is kept strictly secret.” The pact was concealed from Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell for almost a year.

When Cox learned of the Sykes-Picot agreement, he was furious. Not only had he been deceived, but what would become of Mesopotamia? Cox had hoped that Iraq would be annexed under the India Government and that Ibn Saud would be appointed king. McMahon and the Arab Bureau had promised that position to the Sharif Hussein. Now there was even talk that, under Sykes-Picot, Baghdad would have a local ruler, Basrah would belong to the British, and Mosul would go to the French. Cox demanded an explanation.

Arriving in Baghdad in June 1917 to present the Arab Bureau’s side, Ronald Storrs was taken by river launch to Cox’s house. As they stood, cocktails in hand, on the balcony overlooking the Tigris, Cox and Gertrude pumped him for information. At dinner, they questioned him more. What was the thinking in Cairo? they wanted to know, and what was happening in Arabia? Among other things, he reported to them on the Hejaz. He had returned several times, he said, and with T. E. Lawrence to assist him, had met the man who would set the desert ablaze. The man was Faisal, third son of the Sharif Hussein, slim and high-strung, a skillful leader, proven to be shrewd in strategy, strong in battle. As Storrs described the charismatic Faisal, Gertrude took note.

At the office the following morning, it was her turn to fill Storrs in. She described in detail the situation in Mesopotamia, ran down the list of tribes and chiefs, habits and traditions, rivalries and politics, checking off each with masterly ease. Then, like a schoolgirl skipping class, she led him on a fast-paced tour of the town, interviewing sheikhs and notables to hear their positions, taking the political temperature (as she often did) of the merchants in the bazaar. By the end of the visit, Gertrude had made her mark on the man who would soon be Governor of Jerusalem. Her knowledge of Iraq, her familiarity with the people, her understanding of the relationship between the Arabs of Syria, Arabia and Mesopotamia were unique, Storrs wrote in his diary. Her “first-class brain,” her “universal” knowledge, her “level” judgment, outstanding. But for all her strength and drive, he wisely observed, she should be careful: “her frail body” needed rest if it was to endure the heat of summer.

For Gertrude, the visit had added a brilliant spark to her daily routine. Coupled with the recent arrival in Baghdad (thanks to her persuasive efforts with Sir Percy) of her good friend St. John Philby as able deputy to Cox, it sent her spinning. Her work in Mesopotamia now was exhilarating. There had never been anything quite like it before, she wrote to her father: “It’s amazing. It’s the making of a new world.” Outlining a plan for Whitehall, she noted she wanted to take “a decisive hand” in the country’s future. “I shall be able to do that, I shall indeed,” she affirmed. “What does anything else matter when the job is such a big one?”

For the first time in years she began to think about what lay around the corner. Her work had reached a new level of excitement; her little house had begun to feel more like home. Friends like Philby and Bullard frequently came for dinner and good conversation, and over a well-cooked roast and the proper wines she enjoyed pronouncing her views on everything from the strengths and weaknesses of Turkish administration to the Labour Party’s position in England, to the price of meat in Baghdad, to the eating habits of her newest gift, a gazelle. If the latest clothes that arrived fom England weren’t quite what she had envisioned (one of them was “no more of an evening gown than it was a fur coat,” she complained. “I shall just have not to dine out when it gets hot”), the friendliness of the local people, the warmth of the sunshine, the abundance of flowers and fresh fruits more than made up for her disappointments. “It’s so wonderful here, I can’t tell you how much I love it,” she wrote her father.

Rather surprisingly, she refused his invitation to visit England on her vacation. With so much going on, she did not want to leave Iraq right now, she explained. Still, she reassured him, it was his love that gave her the strength to carry on. And in the strange way that she wrote to him, little girlishness combined with womanly passion, she told him their relationship was special: “unique. That’s what it is, dearest beloved one. You know there’s nothing in the world which I would not bring to you, big things and little, with complete assurance of your perfect sympathy and understanding and when necessary forgiveness. What you were to me at a time of sorrow so acute that I still wonder how one can endure such things and live, I shall never be able to say to you—but you know, and in the midst of all this new world which has grown up round me my regret is that I cannot share it more fully with you.” As for the East, “It’s a new life, a new possibility of carrying on existence.… I’m loving it, you know, loving my work and rejoicing in the confidence of my chief.”

S
ummer hit like a furnace blast; by July the daily temperature reached 120 degrees. Gertrude’s parasol was useless; her fair skin baked in the sun, her cheeks stung from the swirling dust, her eyeballs ached in the fierce wind. Even at night the air hardly cooled. The only way she could sleep was to take her mattress to the roof and lie outdoors between wringing wet sheets; when they dried she woke and soaked them again in cold water. It wasn’t long before a tropical illness landed her in the hospital, where she fastened the emerald pin her father had sent for her birthday onto her nightgown.

Sometime in August she was well enough to laugh at a story she heard about an Englishman who had visited a Turkish military hospital before the war. The hospital’s official ledger listed patients as: “Admitted; Cured; Died; Ran Away.” On the last page of the ledger was the total: “Admittances; 6. Cured; 0. Died; 2. Ran Away; 4.”

At the office, an ugly dispute with the army Commander-in-Chief had soured the air. As great a commanding soldier as he was, General Maude was imperious; arrogant toward Cox (his classmate at Sandhurst), intolerant of the Arabs. His interference in political affairs had brought the mild-mannered Cox to the point of thinking seriously about resigning. Sir Percy’s presence, as mentor, father figure, and colleague, meant too much to Gertrude to let this situation go unheeded. She owed him more than her job; her life had become linked to his. In the way that people working together feel a sexual energy derived from thinking and acting intensely in tandem, she felt exhilaration. (She would never have put a sexual connotation on things related to Cox; more likely she would have called it admiration, but whatever its label, it held a strong pull.) With Cox’s permission, she composed a scathing letter to her good friend Arthur Hirtzel, Permanent Under Secretary for the India Office, likening the army command to “denizens of a lunatic asylum.”

The power of her friendships, and her words, were not to be taken lightly. Hirtzel forwarded her letter to Lord Curzon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It confirmed his worst suspicions, Curzon said, and promised to take up the matter with the War Cabinet (without, of course, mentioning Miss Bell). But before General Maude could be reprimanded, he was taken ill. Two days later, on November 16, 1917, the general died of cholera.