A Woman in Arabia (22 page)

Doughty-Wylie was killed on April 26, 1915.
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Where was Judith on November 17? She had been posted to Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. It is most unlikely that either the army or the French hospital service would have seen fit to bring a widow into the war zone. Thirty-nine Victoria Crosses were awarded in all,
including Doughty-Wylie's, and their widows would each have been entitled to the same consideration.

And where was Gertrude at this time? She was at 95 Sloane Street, packing her suitcase for Cairo, telling her father that she expected to arrive at Port Said on Thursday, November 25. On Tuesday, November 30—“this morning after my arrival”—she wrote that she had reached Port Said on the previous Thursday night after a terrible storm at sea.

Cairo is only a short train journey from Port Said. The days and nights of November 27, 28, and 29 are missing from her letters and diaries.

The Cairo Bureau was the intelligence base with specific responsibility for the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force sent to Gallipoli, and its staff included her great friend David Hogarth, her acquaintance Lawrence, Leonard Woolley, and Captain Hall. She was surrounded by friends. She would have had time to catch the express train to Port Said, board a transport ship just leaving with supplies for the Dardanelles, and take a lighter to V beach.

Gertrude's last letter to Florence before she left London suggests that she had put in a private request before she left.

I think it more than likely that when I reach Egypt I shall find they have no job that will occupy me more than a fortnight, and I may be back before Christmas. It's all vaguer than words can say.
As for any further journey nothing definite is said and I think the chances are strongly against it.
[Emphasis added]

Three years before World War I, a chance meeting at an archaeological site in northwest Syria brought together two of the finest minds in the Middle East. Beginning with a purely social encounter, Gertrude Bell and Thomas Edward Lawrence began the intellectual duel that they were to continue all their lives. In an apocryphal comment on the argumentative Lawrence, Gertrude was to say that he “could ignite a fire in a cold room.”

Urfa, May 18, 1911

I went there [Carchemish]—it was only five hours' ride—and found Mr. Thompson and a young man called Lawrence (he is going to make a traveller) who had for some time been expecting that I would appear.

May 23, 1911, Lawrence to His Mother

Miss Gertrude Bell called last Sunday, and we showed her all our finds, and she told us all hers. We parted with mutual expressions of esteem: but she told Thompson his ideas of digging were prehistoric: and so we had to squash her with a display of erudition. She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite, and French architecture . . . and over Greek folk-lore, Assyrian architecture, and Mesopotamian Ethnology
(by Thompson); prehistoric pottery and telephoto lenses, bronze age metal technique, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octobrists . . . : the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway (Thompson). This was a kind of hors d'œuvre: and when it was over (she was getting more respectful) we settled down each to seven or eight subjects and questioned her upon them. She was quite glad to have tea after an hour and a half, and on going told Thompson that he had done wonders in his digging in the time, and that she thought
we
had got everything out of the place that could possibly have been got: she particularly admired the completeness of our note-books. So we did for her. She was really too captious at first, coming straight from the German diggings at Kalaát Shirgat. . . . Our digs are I hope more accurate, if less perfect. . . . So we showed her that, and left her limp, but impressed. She is pleasant: about 36
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, not beautiful, (except with a veil on, perhaps). It would have been most annoying if she had denounced our methods in print. I don't think she will.

To David Hogarth, Gertrude's friend and the chief archaeologist at Carchemish, absent on her arrival, Lawrence wrote more flatteringly, “Gerty has gone back to her tents to sleep. She has been a success: and a brave one.”

The war began and T. E. Lawrence was sent as an army lieutenant to the new Arab Intelligence Bureau in Cairo, which would be coordinating information arising from some sixteen different departments of the British government from Khartoum to London and Delhi. Soon afterward, Gertrude—now with the honorary title of Major Miss Bell—was sent to the same office in Cairo, to master and document the intricacies of Arab politics.

In many ways they were comparable figures. Both obtained first-class honors in history from Oxford, and both were polyglots,
both were passionate archaeologists, and both had an innate affection for the Arabs. As her friend Janet Hogarth was to write, Gertrude “felt the desert with a poet's imagination; it drew her to its heart as it had before her drawn Doughty,
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the solitary and the poet, and as it was later to draw Lawrence.” She spoke Arabic far better than Lawrence, and was fluent in several other Middle Eastern languages. She was better traveled, and skilled in surveillance and cartography. Lawrence, lacking her wealth and therefore her status among the sheikhs of the desert, had not yet been accepted by them as an equal. What made her unique among the clever and well-traveled personnel of the Arab Bureau was not just that she possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of the tribes but that her information was so fresh—it was only eighteen months since she had returned to Britain from the Hayyil journey.

Cairo was full of friends and acquaintances who probably facilitated Gertrude's visit to Doughty-Wylie's grave at Gallipoli. There were David Hogarth; Leonard Woolley, the intelligence chief at Port Said; and Captain Hall, who was in charge of the railway. There was Aubrey Herbert, son of the Earl of Carnarvon, whom she had known for twelve years, his perfect Turkish a useful bureau tool. There was Sir Ronald Storrs, the most entertaining of the sparkling circle, an incomparable linguist who could reduce people of any nationality to helpless laughter in a matter of minutes.

And, of course, there was Lawrence, twenty-seven to Gertrude's forty-seven, a law unto himself and a source of constant aggravation to the military. Scruffy, brilliant, self-absorbed, he had a habit out of the office of wearing embroidered cloaks and waistcoats. The illegitimate son of an impoverished Irish baronet and the governess who cared for the children, he had taken their adopted name of Lawrence but would become successively Lawrence of Arabia, Aircraftman John Hume Ross, and Private Thomas Edward Shaw.

With the inspiring addition of the two new recruits, the Arab Bureau set its course to think and work beyond the failed
strategy of the British military to remove the Turks from Sinai, Palestine, and Arabia. In developing the notion that it was feasible to foster an Arab revolt against the Turks, they were working contrary to official policies. With the sense of a subversive mission, they gave themselves a name: “the Intrusives.”

Gertrude, chain-smoking her way through their meetings, had a different point of view from the military. Disciplined modern warfare, she suggested, had failed on three fronts already. Her grasp of the situation and her persuasive clarity in presenting issues of enormous complexity led the way to realizing Lawrence's plan to “roll up Syria by way of the Hedjaz in the name of the Sherif . . . rush right up to Damascus, and biff the French out of all hope of Syria.” Her knowledge of Arab methods of warfare was a novel addition to the collective determination of the bureau to find the way ahead. Probably the only one among them who had actually taken part in a
ghazu
, Gertrude would have discussed funding insurrection, cutting railway links, hijacking supplies, fostering terrorism, and provoking guerrilla warfare. In a radio broadcast of 1927,
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Lawrence admitted that on the subject of the Arab Revolt he owed much to Gertrude.

It was hoped that a combination of intelligence gathering and analysis would produce a policy capable of setting the Arabs against the Turks, powerful allies of Germany. Gertrude was to identify the tribes, their affiliations and enmities, and map the desert tracks, the water holes and the ways through the mountains, calling on her meticulous diaries. Her letters home were fewer, and she never wrote of Bureau issues to her family: it was a secret office. On the other hand, she had begun her lifelong correspondence with people of political importance, many of whom she knew personally, such as Sir Robert Cecil, who had been the head of the Red Cross when she was working there and was now parliamentary undersecretary of state for foreign affairs.

Cairo, December 20, 1915, Letter to Sir Robert Cecil

Dear Lord Robert,

It is very nice to be able to write to you by bag for otherwise I could talk of nothing but the weather and my health, both of which are too good to call for any comment. They have set me to work here on Arabia, tribes and geography; we are going to bring out a sort of catalogue of the former, paying special attention to their numbers and political grouping, and a new edition of the map. Whether anyone will use them when they are done I don't know, but I am learning a great deal myself, which is delightful, and most amusing when the information is gathered from Arabs who happen to be here. I am getting hold of them gradually; they come up and sit with me by the hour, and I correct place-names and tribe-names in the course of conversation and hear about remote people and near people who were little but shadows before. Telegrams from Aden or Basrah bring fresh stuff—it is great fun as you can imagine. And we will end by producing something which, though it will be full of errors, will be a groundwork for the future. There is nothing else to be done at this moment; we are marking time, not very successfully I fear, in Mesopotamia, and waiting for the Turkish attack on the Canal. News from Syria is lamentably scanty and when it comes not of a very valuable kind. It looks as if they were going to tackle the Mesopotamian expedition before they come here, and as far as Egypt is concerned that is most fortunate, for until the last three weeks no preparations had been made to meet them, and the troops in this country were mostly details or raw and quite incoherent masses of Australians. It is almost incredible that we should have taken such a risk—quite incredible let us hope to the enemy. The negotiations with the Sharif have, however, been very skilfully conducted, and as long as we can keep him in play there is no fear of a big religious movement. He is the only person who could raise a
jehad
—the Turks, preaching at the instigation of the Germans, are as little likely to carry conviction this year as they were last year. The question is whether we
can
keep him in play. From all the information that
comes in he seems to have acquired a very remarkable position in Arabia, but his strength is moral, not military, and if the Turks come down into Syria in force they may be able to put pressure upon him which he could not resist, and indeed it is not improbable that he would succumb to that ally of the Ottoman Government the “climate.” Meantime we are hampered both by the French and by India, as you know. The Sharif, quite rightly as I think, refuses to consider the Arab question apart from the settled lands. He is right, because the desert is not self-supporting, and therefore whoever holds the markets in the cultivated provinces must ultimately control nomads and oasis dwellers. He has not shown himself unreasonable. We could probably come to terms, but never on the basis of relinquishing the whole of Syria—and the demands put forward recently by Picot extended French Syria from the Mediterranean to the Tigris. It would be wise to give the French a very long rope; when they come to consider the administration of such a Syria as that it is not improbable that they would find it a bigger business than they were prepared to undertake. But the weaving of long ropes takes time and it is time which is lacking. A serious Arab movement, if it were once to be set on foot, would turn them out of N. Africa just as easily as it would turn us out of Egypt. I think they will have to be content with the Alexandretta corner and Cilicia (good country and a good port) and of course the Lebanon which they will not forego—I think Beyrout also. The weakness of the argument is that the Arabs can't govern themselves—no one is more convinced of that than I—and when they come to us for help and counsel (as they will) the French will not regard it favourably. However, perhaps we need not look so far ahead, and the immediate necessity is to induce them to accept some compromise acceptable to the Arab party also, in face of the real danger that we may otherwise all founder together. As for the Indian difficulty, the retreat in Mesopotamia may help to bring the Indian Government into line. Mesopotamia is far less complicated a question than Syria; it is decades behind Syria in culture, and the Arab unionist movement has scarcely begun there. We shall not be able to annex either of the two provinces, Basrah or the Iraq, but no one will
object to our administration there if it is not graduated through an Indian bureaucracy. Colonisation would have to be very carefully and delicately handled. I could write a great deal on that subject but I won't! You must have come to the end of your patience and now that I think of it I wonder why I have assumed that you would have any patience with my rather hasty opinions on Near Eastern politics in general.

Cairo, January 3, 1916

. . . My tribe stuff is beginning to be pulled into shape. . . . I love doing it. . . . I can scarcely tear myself away from it. . . . I'm getting to feel quite at home as a Staff Officer! It is comic isn't it.

Lawrence, on the other hand, was itching to leave mapmaking, to which he took a cavalier attitude. As he admitted in a letter concerning his map of Sinai roads and wells, “Some of it was accurate, and the rest I invented.” One day, he feared, nemesis was awaiting him: he would be told to find his way about with nothing but a copy of his own map.

The Indian government, headed by the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, remained determined to extend its authority in Arabia and to annex Mesopotamia. Gertrude, who had first met Hardinge nearly thirty years previously, was sent to Delhi on a political mission to put the Intrusives' point of view.

Cairo, January 24, 1916

There is a great deal of friction between India and Egypt over the Arab question which entails a serious want of co-operation between the Intelligence Departments of the two countries and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. It's absurd of course; we are all well-meaning people trying to do our best, but they don't realise what Arabia looks like from the West and I daresay we don't realise how it looks from the East.

So I'm going—whether much good will come of it I don't
know, but it's worth trying at any rate and I shall learn a good deal for I hope they will let me dig into their Arab files and see what can be added from them to our knowledge. I think they will probably pay my journey, if not I shall go all the same because I think it's a good thing to do—in which case you will understand why my bank is called upon to honour a big cheque to the P & O Company. I expect you will approve of my proceedings as usual! We want to establish here a permanent Intelligence Bureau for the Near East, which shall endure after the war is over—it would be invaluable; but it could not work properly without the sympathy and help of India and that is the chief matter I wish to discuss with the Viceroy.

She was warmly greeted by the viceroy, who listened to her clear reasoning and sent her on to Basra, at that time the military center of activity in Mesopotamia as the army prepared to march north and drive the Turks out of Baghdad. He warned her that there would be considerable opposition on the part of intelligence and military staff to accepting a woman as an equal. She would be working at General Sir Percy Lake's military headquarters without title, job, or pay.