Enemy on the Euphrates (19 page)

On 7 October the terms of an Allied–Ottoman armistice were settled in Paris and the date on which it was to be signed was fixed for 30 October. The following day Allenby’s troops captured Beirut. On 13 October the Ottoman Chargé d’Affaires in Madrid asked the Spanish government to invite President Wilson to take upon himself the task of re-establishing peace. Meanwhile, in Iraq, every effort was being made to advance further up the Tigris before the whistle blew.

By 21 October Marshall was still 140 miles from Mosul and the Turks were strongly entrenched in the Fatha gorge on either side of the Tigris, and on the Lesser Zab river, with 5,500 infantry and 42 field guns. In and around Kirkuk they also had 2,500 infantry and 30 guns. But in a series of hard-fought battles, the numerically superior British infantry and cavalry, supported by armoured cars and aircraft, pushed back the Turkish troops, surrounding and isolating various units as they advanced. By the end of October the Turkish forces were exhausted and demoralised and at daybreak on the 30th the British troops were cheered by the sight of a forest of white flags in the trenches opposite them. At 7.30 a.m., what was left of the Ottoman Sixth Army defending the approaches to Mosul surrendered; all that remained was a force of about 1,650 infantry and 32 guns defending Mosul itself and a further 1,500 infantry and 12 guns on their way to the city, having been dislodged from the town of Altun Kopri north of Kirkuk. A further major advance towards Mosul was halted by a shortage of supplies and munitions, but by the evening of 31 October – by which time news of the signing of the armistice had reached Marshall – a small force of cavalry and armoured cars had penetrated as far as Qaiyara, but still about forty miles distant from Mosul itself.

However, on 2 November 1918 the British authorities in Baghdad received unambiguous orders from the War Office that Mosul was to be captured, coupled with the detailed terms of the Anglo-Ottoman armistice, one of whose clauses required the ‘surrender of all garrisons in Hejaz, Asir, Yemen, Syria and Mesopotamia to the nearest Allied Commander’. But what, exactly, was Mesopotamia? Did it include Mosul? The name ‘Mesopotamia’ was not in current official or diplomatic
usage in the Ottoman Empire, and even in British parlance it was an extremely vague expression. However, the day before, Marshall had already instructed his second in command, General Cassells, to push on and seize Mosul. Cassells received this order at midnight of 1 November, only a few hours after he had also received a letter from ‘Ali Ihsan Pasha, the Ottoman commander at Mosul, demanding that Cassells withdraw his troops to Qaiyara, the furthest point reached by the British force at the moment the armistice had been signed.

Nevertheless, on the morning of 2 November, Cassells sent Colonel Leachman, under a flag of truce, into Mosul where he informed ‘Ali Ihsan that he must withdraw his troops a distance of five miles from the city, leaving only a small number of guards and police to prevent disorder. At midday Leachman returned with the message that ‘Ali Ihsan would not leave Mosul but would evacuate the hills south of and dominating the city which General Cassells might occupy if he wished. Although Cassells felt satisfied by this offer, when he informed Marshall the latter insisted that it was wholly unsatisfactory, that his orders were to occupy the city itself and all the surrounding vilayet. At a further face-to-face conference between Cassells and ‘Ali Ihsan, the Turkish commander again rejected the British demand, arguing that it was contrary to the terms of the armistice since Mosul was not a part of ‘Mesopotamia’.

On 7 November yet another conference took place, in Mosul itself, this time between General Marshall and ‘Ali Ihsan. Arnold Wilson was present and recorded how Marshall now threatened to attack if the Turks did not withdraw from the whole vilayet of Mosul within ten days, insisting that if ‘Ali Ihsan refused, he would personally be held responsible for any blood that was spilt. The Turkish commander continued to resist for some hours, strenuously protesting that Marshall’s demands were contrary to the terms of the armistice, but eventually, worn down by the ceaseless British pressure, he agreed the wording of a document put before him. By the evening of 7 November 1918 Mosul and its environs, including the potentially rich oil-bearing lands, were in British hands and Colonel Gerard Leachman was appointed military governor of the city.

So now the die was cast. Britain had stumbled into a terrible war in the Middle East and in so doing had totally destroyed a vast and venerable empire. But what was to be done with its remains? In late 1918 it looked as though Anatolian Turkey would eventually be sliced up between Greece, Italy and France. For the moment some kind of independent Arab state in Syria seemed a possibility. Palestine’s future as a ‘home’ for European Jewish colonists had already been decided by the Balfour Declaration and, for the moment, the stony desert lands which would later become the state of Jordan were of no particular interest to anyone. But Iraq was a different matter. Within a year three different perspectives would emerge as to what should be done with this huge but unanticipated accretion of imperial territory

Firstly, there were those – especially among the military and civilian authorities currently administering the occupation – who believed that after all the sacrifices in men and resources which the war in Iraq had entailed, it should become an outright colony on the Indian model. Secondly, there was a significant body of opinion, closely associated with the Cairo group of military intelligence personnel who had promoted the ‘Arab Revolt’ against the Turks in the Hejaz, who believed that Britain did not have the moral authority to establish a fully fledged colonial regime in Iraq but thought it would be possible to retain de facto control by creating some kind of semi-independent Arab state which would remain sympathetic to British economic and strategic interests. Lawrence and Sykes both shared this vision. Thirdly, there were those – probably the majority of the informed British public – who simply thought that any further involvement with Iraq, whatever its form, would be an extravagant waste of money and that, at a time of deepening economic crisis, Britain should simply withdraw all its forces from the country.

But whereas the third of these perspectives almost certainly commanded the greatest popular support, it had one very serious defect. By late 1918 it had become clear to Britain’s ruling class that the nature of military technology had been irreversibly transformed and that in any future war the survival of its empire would depend on the
availability of substantial quantities of cheap and easily accessible oil. Since Iraq was believed to have large, albeit undeveloped, oil reserves, the country couldn’t be abandoned and allowed to fall entirely into the hands of ‘irresponsible natives’, or worse, the Turks or Bolsheviks. So the ‘oil factor’ dictated that, in deciding on the most appropriate method of dealing with Britain’s territorial acquisitions in the Middle East, the choice could only be between the first and second of the three perspectives outlined above. The proponents of these alternative policies would now begin an acrimonious struggle to determine which method of control – outright colonialism or ‘informal empire’ via a ‘friendly native state’ – would predominate.

While the newly victorious British forces were still pushing north up the Tigris, an important addition was made to Sir Percy Cox’s political administration in Baghdad, the forty-nine-year-old Miss Gertrude Lowthian Bell.

The granddaughter of a wealthy Northumberland ironmaster, Miss Bell’s imagination had been fired by the Islamic East after graduating from Oxford with a first-class degree in Modern History in 1888. It was a time when the ‘Romance’ of the East – a word she herself would later use frequently in her literature and letters – was fast becoming an imaginative construct to rival the prevalent notion of a ‘fanatical’ and ‘treacherous’ East given over to cruelty, decadence and despotism. By the outbreak of war, Gertrude Bell had already become famous for her work in the fields of exploration, archaeology and literature. She had published three books based on her travels in the Middle East as well as a well-received translation of the verse of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz and through years of study and many months of solitary travelling she had become a fluent and grammatical speaker of Persian and Arabic. In 1913 she had accomplished a daring journey across northern Arabia to the court of the Al-Rashid at Ha’il, the pro-Turkish Arab dynasty of the great Shammar tribe, and in recognition of this and her previous works of exploration and archaeology, in May 1914 she was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal by the Royal Geographical Society.

In autumn 1915 she had been working in London helping to reorganise the Red Cross operations tracing the families of men killed and missing in action on the Western Front. Then, out of the blue, she received an invitation from the head of Naval Intelligence, a family friend, to go to Cairo and apply her detailed knowledge of Arab affairs to the efforts of a team of Middle East ‘specialists’ based at the Savoy Hotel. After a short but highly successful few months in this role, the following March she was ordered to move to Basra to furnish the High Command in Iraq with a greater understanding of the population which was now under the control of the military authorities. And having further demonstrated her expertise in this field, in April 1917 Miss Bell received orders that she proceed to recently captured Baghdad to act as oriental secretary to the chief political officer, Sir Percy Cox.

Gertrude Bell, Oriental Secretary to Sir Percy Cox, Baghdad, 1921

In letters to her father and stepmother she positively gushed with enthusiasm about her new role. Apologising for not being able to return to England for a holiday in the spring of 1917, she explains how she ‘couldn’t possibly come away from here at this moment. It’s an immense opportunity, just at this time when the atmosphere is so emotional … What does anything else matter when the job is such a big one? … There never was anything quite like this before, you must understand that – it’s amazing. It’s the making of a new world.’
¹

As in Cairo and Basra, Gertrude soon established a gruelling daily routine. She would rise and go out riding from 6.00 to 7.30 a.m.; then have a bath, breakfast and go straight to her office, where she frequently continued working until 7.00 or even 8.00 p.m. As the temperature continued to rise towards 100°f she soon found that only the lightest of lunches was required – a bowl of yoghurt and a cup of Arabic coffee. In the evening she delighted in the plentiful supplies of fresh fruit which had been largely absent in Basra – ‘excellent oranges’ in April, succeeded the following month by ‘apricots in masses and small sweet greengages’. Melons were also beginning to appear and she could also look forward to the arrival of grapes and figs during June and July: ‘truly a bountiful country’, she wrote to her parents.

As to the work itself, she told her parents how much she was ‘loving it … loving my work and rejoicing in the confidence of my chief’. Her duties were numerous and diverse. She tried to take as much as possible
of the burden from the shoulders of Sir Percy. It was she who would meet and placate the constant stream of petitioners arriving at his HQ; she who would interview representatives of the various classes and creeds of the city and surrounding areas, gathering intelligence about the political leanings and loyalties of this or that particular notable. She played hostess to important visitors to Baghdad, such as her opposite number in Cairo, Ronald Storrs, who arrived from Egypt in early May, and a young PO, Harry St John Philby, who came up from ‘Amara later in the month to be the editor of the official Arabic-language newspaper
Al-‘Arab
, which the British authorities had decided would be a suitable concession to what Gertrude rather disingenuously described as ‘the new order of Arab liberty’.

In late 1917, one of the fruits of Gertrude Bell’s research,
The Arab of Mesopotamia –
a concise monograph prepared especially for neophyte British officers arriving in Iraq – was published by the Government Press in Basra. In it, two very important points were underlined.

The first was that the majority of Arabs in Iraq were no longer nomadic but settled, or, at least, semi-settled, cultivators of one sort or another: in short, the tribesmen were increasingly akin to peasants while their sheikhs were fast becoming landlords. Over many centuries the nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula had drifted northwards and eastwards, driven by population pressure and the gradual desiccation of their traditional grazing lands. Although this process had begun even before the dawn of Islam, Gertrude Bell pointed out that many of the tribes now settled along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates ‘have come in during the last two or three hundred years’.
²
As they slowly migrated, the wandering tribes eventually found themselves upon the very limits of the desert – the great cultivated ‘barrier’ of the Euphrates. The wide spaces essential to nomadic existence no longer stretched out before them while the pressure of those migrating tribes behind them forbade any return to Arabia. So the great Iraqi tribal confederations – the Muntafiq, Zubayd, Dulaym, Bani Huchaym, ‘Ubayd, Khaza’il, Bani Lam, Al Bu Muhammad, Rabi‘a and sections of the Shammar – settled down and began to engage in agriculture, fishing and the raising of domestic animals.