A Woman in Arabia (26 page)

With the departure of the Turkish authorities in March 1917, the law, sultani
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and technical schools ceased to exist as institutions, for nearly all the teachers were Anatolian Turks and left with the rest of Stambul officialdom, while in the case of the technical school the Turks blew up the machinery and burned the building. As to the primary schools, they were nearly all
looted by the mob. If it took rather longer to open some of the Baghdad schools than might have been expected, the delay may be attributed to the people themselves, who looted all the furniture and equipment of the schools and carried off the doors, windows and other portable fittings. . . .

The principal language taught was Turkish, Arabic being treated as a secondary language. The teachers were mostly Turks, often with only a scanty knowledge of Arabic; they were men of bad character, highly paid and incompetent. The school buildings were dirty and insanitary, and the schools hotbeds of vice to which respectable Arabs hesitated to send their boys. No one who was not of the Sunni sect was recognised as a teacher, and this, in a population predominantly Shi'ah, discouraged attendance. The registers were filled with fictitious entries. . . .

On these considerations it was decided that the medium of instruction should be Arabic throughout with English taught as a foreign language. . . . Primary text-books were carefully selected from the official primary text-books in use in Egypt, and class-room furniture was purchased from abroad.

The Law

This system of local justice was recognised by us to be a strong weapon on the side of order and good conduct. Just as it was the habit of the British Military Governors when hearing cases to call in the mukhtars, the headmen of the town quarters, and ask them to take part in the proceedings, so the Political Officers turned to the shaikhs of tribe and village and obtained their opinion. . . .

In one respect tribal custom, as administered by the majlis,
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is not wholly satisfactory in our eyes. The tribesman regards the exaction of blood money payable to the relations of the murdered man as of greater moment than the punishment of the murderer, and is apt to be content with the fine without any further retribution.

. . . In accepting tribal usage the Political Officer might find himself called upon to impose penalties which are foreign to British judicial tradition. Thus in cases of blood feud the tribes of the Euphrates almost invariably require the guilty party, in addition to the payment of blood money, to hand over a virgin to the family of the deceased, and they value this custom not only as a punishment, but also a safeguard, for, as they justly observe, the payment of fines does nothing towards allaying animosity, whereas inter-marriage provides a community of interests. . . .

Humanitarian Aid

The occupation of the Mosul Wilayat [where the Turks had held on, ten thousand people died of starvation in the winter of 1917–18] brought the British Administration into direct relations with the Kurds. . . . In no part of Mesopotamia had we encountered anything comparable to the misery which greeted us at Khaniqin. The country harvested by the Russians had been sedulously gleaned by the Turks, who, when they retired, left it in the joint possession of starvation and disease. The work of administration was at first little more than a battle with these formidable adversaries. . . . No sooner did the Kurds on both sides of the frontier hear that help was to be had, than they poured down the mountains, starving and typhus-stricken, to be brought slowly back to health, or else to die in our camps and hospitals. . . .

In the surrounding districts cultivation had for the last two years been completely suspended, and the population had been reduced by about 75 per cent of its pre-war figure. So severe was the famine that in some districts the inhabitants were living entirely on herbs and the few acorns which were left, and had been constrained to devour cats and dogs, and even in some cases human flesh.

Steps were taken at once to deal with the famine, grain was imported from Arbil, poor relief started, agriculture encouraged, and a measure of law and order secured.

Agriculture

On the Tigris from Samarra to the vicinity of Baghdad all cultivation had been destroyed. . . . What the Turks had not eaten they had destroyed. Nearer Baghdad the rain and flood had failed. This was the third bad season in succession, and stocks of vegetable seeds, cereals, and, most important of all, fodder, had been reduced to a minimum. . . . From Baghdad to Kut there was no cultivation except on a few lifts and an area in the Jaznah, where the ground was still moist from the flood of 1915. . . . The Turks had deliberately removed the tribes from the river banks and forbidden agriculture. . . .

The chief duties of the Irrigation Directorate are flood protection, a heavy item with rivers which have a spring rise of 20 feet or more, the control and conservancy of rivers and canals, the provision of an adequate water supply at the heads of watercourses, and the distribution of water as between different watercourses. . . . Several canals have been re-aligned or extended, the new lands commanded by them being eagerly taken up. An important piece of work is now in progress between two of the Euphrates channels which it is hoped will bring back into cultivation large tracts which have long lain barren.

. . . The necessity of controlling irrigation was at once apparent. . . . Canal clearance had also to be arranged. . . . By far the most important irrigation work which claimed attention was the great dam at the offtake of the Hindiyah channel from the Euphrates . . . subject to destructive fluctuations. . . . British engineers visited it in May 1917, and as the military irrigation services extended . . . water flowed down the two loop canals in time to permit the winter sowings of wheat and barley, and the country on either side of the Hindiyah, after having lain barren for several years, was in January 1918 covered with springing barley. . . .

It would be difficult to estimate the proportion of the crop of 1918 which was due directly to the Agricultural Development Scheme combined with the operations of the Irrigation Department, but the army was able to procure between 50,000 and 60,000 tons of grain from the spring crop, and the needs of the
civil population were supplied. . . . Not only was Mesopotamia safeguarded from famine, but by releasing the grain which had been stored against another lean year we were able to feed the Bedouin, and thereby to keep them in order, and to succour the Kurds on both sides of our frontier.

Oil

Abadan, the refinery of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, was henceforth safe, and from being an object the protection of which was one of the primary duties of the Force, it assumed for the rest of the war the role of purveyor of crude oil, kerosene and petrol to every branch of His Majesty's services. The record of its work is one of which all those associated with it, as well as with the distant oil fields on which it depends, may well be proud.

From its tiny beginnings in Basra in 1915, the British administration grew in size as it settled into its role in Baghdad. Its remit extended over 150,000 square miles and some 3 million people. The secretariat remained small: Sir Percy Cox, Gertrude, and three other Cabinet-level officials. In total, there were five hundred executive staff including doctors, nurses, irrigation specialists, and agricultural researchers. The policies of the government were pursued throughout the country by a mere seventy Political Officers, each with a couple of Indian clerks, a sergeant, and a handful of riflemen. The income obtained by taxes grew tenfold during the five years. All of it was used to fund the medical, agricultural, veterinary, judicial, and other government services. The army, paid for by London, rebuilt and extended roads, railways, canals, ports, and public buildings, although the cost of this became a debt for the future government to pay off. Naturally, import and export trade collapsed in 1915 as the Turks retreated, but by 1919 it was more than four times greater than when they were in power.

Meanwhile, even the administrators were on iron rations. The food in the mess, where Gertrude ate during the working
week, was rationed and monotonous. A family friend of the Bells, Colonel Frank Balfour, who later became Baghdad's military governor, tells the story of joining her in the mess one evening for dinner. When, for the fourteenth day running, the meal consisted of bully beef, Gertrude surprised him by throwing down her knife and fork in disgust and bursting into tears.

October 12, 1917

We are put to it to feed ourselves, and it is hard to feel Herculean on biscuits—We've had no butter all summer and when we have it it's tinned. I've forgotten what potatoes taste like—the meat is almost too tough to eat, chickens ditto; milk tinned—how sick one gets of it! . . . When one's feeling rather a poor thing one does hate it all. . . . Heaven send us a good harvest next year.

The ferocious heat of Iraq was, perhaps, the main factor in the breakdown of her health. Light as she made of it in her letters home, she now frequently suffered from heat exhaustion, combined with overwork, cigarettes, and recurring malaria. Every summer she had to repair to an officers' convalescent home for a few days' recovery, and even in hospital she continued to write position papers and draft a fortnightly diary for the government. Her red hair turned white, and she wrote home to explain the extreme measures she used to get cool.

Baghdad, July 13, 1917

We have had a week of fierce heat, which still continues, temp 122 odd and therewith a burning wind which has to be felt to be believed. On the worst nights . . . I drop a sheet in water and without wringing it out lay it in a pile along my bed between me and the wind. I put one end over my feet and draw the other under and over my head and leave the rest a few inches from my body. The sharp evaporation makes it icy cold and interposes a
little wall of cold air between me and the fiery wind. When it dries I wake up and repeat the process. This evening Sir Percy and I went out motoring at 7 but it was too hot. The wind shrivelled you and burnt your eyeballs. . . . My room in the office I shut up all day long and have it sluiced out with water 2 or 3 times a day. By these means I keep the temp at just under 100 [38°C].

Yes, that's what it is like.

When dresses had to be washed and ironed every day, she was in constant need of cool Western clothing. Her family sent her parcels of clothes, but there were never enough. She called in on a convent and explained her predicament.

Baghdad, June 14, 1918

The nuns are making me a muslin gown—it will be a monument of love and care. The essayages are not like any other dressmaking I've ever known. I go in after riding before breakfast and stand in practically nothing but breeches and boots (for it's hot) while the Mother Superior and the darling dressmaking sister, Soeur Renée, hover round ecstatically and pin on bits of muslin. At our elbows a native lay sister bearing cups of coffee. We pause often while the Mother Superior and Soeur Renée discuss gravely what really is the fashion. Anyhow the result is quite satisfactory. Soeur Renée isn't a Frenchwoman for nothing.

Her highly pressurized life was complicated by her need for a maid, housekeeper, and dressmaker. Her stepmother, Florence, came up with a solution: Marie Delaire had been with the Bells since Gertrude hired her seventeen years previously. She came out to Iraq and served Gertrude devotedly for the rest of her mistress's life.

In October 1917, Gertrude was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and a year later she was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for
her journey to Hayyil. In a glimpse of Gertrude during an at home given for forty or fifty Arab notables in Baghdad in 1919, she is described as entering the room in queenly style, “beautifully dressed as always” while everyone rose to their feet. She went around the room, shaking the hands of everyone in turn and saying a few appropriate words to each.

Since Cairo, she had been living in the East on her salary of £20 a month ($16,320 RPI adjusted equivalent to a salary of $88,000 income adjusted), and her generous private allowance had been piling up at home, unused. Since the two things she craved—good food and well-made European clothing—were unavailable, she responded to her father's letter about her allowance with the lack of financial interest that is the prerogative of heiresses that he should do whatever he wanted with the money. She was in the hospital when her father sent her a forty-ninth birthday present: a great emerald, which she pinned on her nightdress. A month later, Florence sent another parcel.

September 25, 1917

There arrived a jeweller's shop of brooches and pendants—the loveliest things—how could you reconcile it with your conscience, both of you, to run to such extravagance? I've never had so many brooches in my life. . . . Anyhow, bless you both; they are exquisite and I expect will excite the unbounded admiration of I.E.F.D. [Indian Expeditionary Force D]

So successfully put together and administered, so successful in its occupation until the end of the war, the British government of Mesopotamia was about to be undermined by interminable delays while it waited for international decisions on the position of the borders and its future in Iraq. Meanwhile, many strands of minority dissent, fanned into flames by Turkish agents, would grow into outright revolt. Waiting impatiently, Gertrude had to watch all progress slipping away in the teeth
of growing anarchy. At this most difficult moment, Sir Percy Cox was sent to Tehran, leaving his former deputy A. T. Wilson as acting civil commissioner. He proved to be a boss whose high-handed tactics, punitive retaliation against dissidents, and preference for imperialist policies brought home to Gertrude the appalling truth: he had no sympathy for self-determination and would do his best to prevent it. He was built from a heroic colonialist mold, but his views placed him in the past. Gertrude, though eighteen years older, with her particular intelligence and her wholehearted dedication to the Arab cause, belonged to the future.