Desert Queen (70 page)

S
ister, daughter or lover, associate or friend, it was to men that she swore her allegiance. She “was always the slave of some momentary power,” T. E. Lawrence later wrote with hubris; “at one time Hogarth, at another Wilson, at another me, at last Sir Percy Cox.” It was men who appreciated her political skills, respected her keen intellect and admired her commanding personality, and she, in turn, appreciated, respected and admired them. And if her sharp tongue and impatience intimidated some of her colleagues, so be it. But with rare exceptions, she had little regard for their wives, and they felt the same about her. The women’s superficial interests, she believed, were equalled only by their deep suspicion of anything strange. Her one good friend, Aurelia Tod, who was Italian, had moved away, and the only other person she felt close to was Haji Naji. The kindly Shiite who sent her baskets of fruits and flowers was “an odd substitute for a female friend, but the best I can find,” she confessed. “That’s partly why I talk so much in my letters!”

At a fancy dinner with Arab magnates, given at the British Military School, Gertrude chatted with her friends Haji Naji, Nuri Said and Jafar Pasha, but out of the corner of her eye she inspected the women up and down. Lady Cox was a “model of discretion,” she observed, but Mrs. Slater’s brilliant green-and-gold gown, cut sleeveless and “outrageously low,” sent Gertrude rushing off to curse privately in Sir Percy’s ear. “I do wish that our women would show some suitability in their attire,” she sniffed. The venerable Arabs’ conception of female dress “is that it should leave no female visible,” she wrote home. “I hope that Sir Percy will send out a sumptuary order … but not in my report—I don’t want to antagonize the whole feminine world, with which I stand badly enough already, damn women!”

Like a chef in a Middle East kitchen, she stirred up a pungent stew, pouring in a mélange of spicy intrigues and, every so often, taking a spoonful of tantalizing power. In her own home, Arab politicians, British officials, and visiting writers like John Dos Passos of the
New York Tribune
, came regularly to dine. She still had her Tuesday teas for the Arab women, and with great sympathy for some, she still paid calls on the harems. After visiting the home of Daud Bey, “a worthless vicious man who spends all his money on dancing girls,” she came away in a fury. A popular figure among the British officers (due to his skill at polo), Daud was a far less popular man in his own home. Although by Muhammadan law the women in his family had a right to a share of his property, he refused to give either his mother or his nine beautiful sisters any money to spend. After hearing the women’s story, Gertrude summoned Daud. He cringed and bristled as she told him what she thought of him, but to her satisfaction, he eventually caved in. “Muslim women who never go out of the house and see no one are absolutely helpless in the face of their menfolk,” she chafed, “and there’s such a feeling against interfering in a man’s domestic affairs that no one does anything to help. I am in the strong position of being a woman so that I can go and see the women and take their part. But how I do hate Islam!”

Not all her visits to Arab women were gloomy. She enjoyed showing them how to dress in the European style, and once in a while she took it upon herself to teach a child, such as the daughter of Musa Chalabi, to read English, or to train some youngsters to sing. Gathering them together in a quivering chorus, she pounded out the melody on an old piano. “Open those mouths! Exaggerate the sounds! Louder! Louder!” she ordered. And standing like shaking leaves, the Arab children sang out “God Save The King.”

G
unshots in the north soon shattered the autumn air. Promises had been made to the Kurds that a republic would be established after the war, but with no formal treaty yet signed between Britain and Turkey, Kurdish activists were inciting their tribes to rebel. The Sunni Kurds made up one fifth of the Iraqi population, and if the new state of Iraq was to succeed, Gertrude believed it had to include the oil-rich region of Mosul and the grain-growing areas of Tikrit and Kirkuk. Nor could an independent Kurdistan survive; economically, the Kurds could not afford to exist alone and the British could not afford to defend them. “We haven’t a penny to spend in furthering Kurdish independence,” she insisted, “for if we encourage them we shall only have to abandon them in the hour of need, which would be the worst thing possible.”

In October 1921, after Faisal made a tour of the Mosul area, he came back to Baghdad convinced that he had won the loyalty of the Kurds. “On both sides a feeling of personal confidence has been established,” Gertrude wrote to her father. “That’s exactly what one wants to see, the establishment of mutual confidence between the King and his subjects.”

But an international conference was soon to be held in Lausanne to settle the issue of Mosul, and once again the natives started skirmishing. Pro-Turkish Kurds were trying to reclaim the territory for Turkey before the meeting took place. As an ethnic (non-Arab) group, the Kurds felt more allied to Persia and Turkey, with their large Kurdish populations, than to Iraq and its Arabs. Yet as Sunni Muslims, they were essential to Faisal’s kingdom, helping to balance the scale with the Shiites.

Smelling trouble, on November 3 Gertrude took the train north. “Kirkuk,” she said, “has refused rudely to swear allegiance to Faisal.” Half its population was Kurdish and the other half Turkish and, the latter wanted to restore their ties to Turkey. But, she noted, “since Kirkuk is in the middle of Iraq, [it] can’t be countenanced.” She would brook no nonsense, and urging Sir Percy to send a message to the instigators, she advised: “We must regretfully inform them that if they come they’ll have the warmest welcome they ever met with. The guns they’ve heard; the Levies are ready and behind them aeroplanes enough to obscure the light of the sun.”

Adding to the instability in Iraq was the dispute over the southern border. After years of menacing raids, Ibn Saud had finally struck and captured Hayil, the home of Ibn Rashid. Angry Shammar tribesmen stuffed their camel bags with revenge as they fled north, seeking refuge with the Anazeh. Border raids blazed the sand as Ibn Saud threatened not only Faisal in Iraq, but his brother Abdullah in TransJordan and his father, Sharif Hussein, in Mecca. “The underlying bitterness between him and the Sharifian family baffles description,” Gertrude observed.

Sir Percy Cox wanted a conference to clarify which tribes and lands belonged to Ibn Saud in Arabia and which to Faisal in Iraq. The frontier still needed to be clearly defined, and Gertrude spent time poring over a map, plotting the water wells claimed by the Shammar and those claimed by the Anazeh, drawing the boundary lines with Arabia. Seated beside her in the office were an Arab from Hayil and her favorite chieftain, Fahad Bey: “The latter’s belief in my knowledge of the desert makes me blush,” she chirped. “When he was asked by Mr. Cornwallis to define his tribal boundaries all he said was: ‘You ask the Khatun. She knows.’ ”

She stood at the pinnacle of her power. Yet as she peered out at the lofty vista, she could feel the earth beneath her beginning to slide. “I think I have been of some use here but I suspect I’ve come very near the end of it,” she confided to Hugh. “I often wonder whether I am right to stay here.” For the moment, however, she faced an enormous amount of work. A treaty of alliance between Britain and Iraq remained to be signed, but the issue of the mandate smeared the paper.

The British tied the treaty to the mandate they had received from the League of Nations; the Arabs saw the treaty as a means of breaking the humiliating mandate. Winston Churchill, then the Colonial Secretary, intended to hold on to British influence as long as possible, and the treaty was a subterfuge for keeping control. The pact would give the British almost complete authority over the financial and foreign affairs of the infant Iraqi state. But to the Arabs, the treaty represented a way of breaking loose, of gaining their honor, of restoring their pride, of establishing their independence. As King, Faisal intended to make Iraq an equal of England. If and when a treaty was signed, he wanted it to supersede the mandate.

Encouraged to seek independence by the United States, which had never recognized the mandate and wanted, in part, to reap its own financial rewards from the Arabs, the Iraqis would put up a strong fight against the mandate. “Oil is the trouble of course—detestable stuff,” Gertrude complained.

The path was hardly smooth, she wrote to a friend: “You know well enough that to travel along any oriental road at present is a breathless adventure. The worst stumbling blocks are however of our making—broken promises, impossible and therefore unratified treaties, mandates. It’s the last which touches us most here.

“From the very beginning,” she explained, “the King told us with complete frankness that he would fight the mandate to the death. His reason is obvious. He wants to prove to the world of Islam which is bitterly anti-British that in accepting the British help he has not sacrificed the independence of an Arab state—that he has gained that which he has already told the world he could gain through free and equal alliance with us.”

A thorn in everyone’s side, the mandate nettled the feelings of Iraqis and British alike, causing the entire relationship to come into question. As confidante of the King and close adviser to Cox, the Khatun was entrusted with the secrets of both. But when her love for Iraq clashed with her pride in the Empire, she remained on the side of her motherland, England. Despite her objections to the mandate, she recognized the need for British officials to toe the line. “We had no alternative,” she acknowledged. “We have told the King that under our instructions we must point out to him that he has only two courses. One is to reject the treaty with its underlying mandate, in which case we go; the other is to accept it and with it our help.”

Whatever rumblings shook the ground between Iraq and Britain, for now the bond between Gertrude and Faisal remained strong. “I can’t tell you how delightful our relations are,” she wrote glowingly, “an affectionate confidence which I don’t think could well be shaken. He usually addresses me with ‘Oh my sister’ which makes me feel like someone in the
Arabian Nights.
He is of course an exceptional beguiler—everyone falls under the charm—and his extremely subtle and quick intelligence is backed by a real nobility of purpose of which I’m always conscious.”

Chatting one afternoon with the King, Gertrude let drop that she planned to go home the next summer. “You’re not to talk of going
home
,” Faisal replied severely; “your home is here. You may say you are going to see your father.” Despite his sharp tone, his words pleased her; her fear of not being needed seemed premature. And adding color to her blush was the budding of a new romance.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
THREE

Ken

A
man of Olympian height, with an outsized nose and piercing blue eyes, Kinahan Cornwallis had the strong looks and keen mind that Gertrude found attractive. Like her, he had been at Oxford, making his mark in athletics as well as in academics, and like her, he had been attached to the Arab Bureau, serving first as liaison to the Sharif Hussein and his son Faisal, and then as chief of the Cairo Intelligence office. He spoke in a slow, gruff voice, exhibited a quiet manner and evidenced a leadership that inspired trust. He was “forged from one of those incredible metals with a melting point of thousands of degrees,” Lawrence described him; “he could remain for months hotter than other men’s white-heat, and yet look cold and hard.” For Gertrude, he was “a tower of strength and wisdom,” who bore the triumph of the Arabs over the Turks, of practicality over pipe dreams, of wisdom over whim. If she was the romantic breeze, he was the steady rock.

Personal Adviser to the King and Chief Adviser in the Ministry of the Interior, Kinahan Cornwallis was the only other British official besides Gertrude in whom Faisal had great confidence. The two had been placed side by side, supporting stakes behind the sapling King.