Gertrude Bell (41 page)

Kitchener's hints were succeeded by McMahon's equally shrewd obfuscations. Carried in elaborate secrecy to the Amir Hussain, in the hilts of daggers and the soles of shoes, the letters continued to explore the likelihood and ramifications of an Arab revolt against the Turks. Nothing definite had been promised, but, nevertheless, Hussain had seized on the idea that he might become the ruler of the Arab nation.

“The Arab Question,” as it was called, affected Gertrude particularly in that her initial job was to master the intricacies of Arab politics and personalities in the Hejaz, from Jerusalem as far south as Mecca, where it was hoped the revolt might be initiated. She was to collect together all her tribal information and fill in any gaps, identifying the tribes and their affiliations and enmities, which she would always enliven with entertaining character sketches of the many sheikhs she knew. At the same time she would map the desert tracks, passable ways through the mountains and waterless expanses, transportation facilities, and natural resources, together with the positions and influences of racial and religious groupings and minorities. “My tribe stuff is beginning to be pulled into shape . . . I love doing it . . . I can scarcely tear myself away from it,” she wrote.

The second part of Gertrude's work centred on Mesopotamia, which had become of prime importance as the war commenced. Since the earliest civilization this region, set between its natural boundaries of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, provided a fertile easterly frame to Arabia's northern deserts and gave a passable route to the Indian Ocean through the waters of the Persian Gulf in the south-east. The Mesopotamian Campaign, begun in 1914, had stemmed from the 1911 decision of the First Sea Lord, Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher, with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill, to give more speed to the British navy by converting its ships from coal to oil. It became a priority to ensure a reliable British-owned source of crude.

The two largest suppliers of oil until 1908 had been America and Russia, but the yield in Azerbaijan had begun to fall, and was by no means under British control. In that year, Burmah Oil struck lucky in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, on the borders of Mesopotamia and Persia. The company would supply fuel oil to the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), piping it the 138 miles down to Abadan, to a new refinery on the east bank of the Shatt al Arab, the great waterway at the southern end of Mesopotamia that carries the Tigris and Euphrates
into the Persian Gulf. The British government provided £2.2 million and took a 51 per cent share in APOC, together with a twenty-year contract for the supply of the navy.

Now there were crucial reasons that Britain should fight the Turks in Mesopotamia: to secure the oil and its pipelines; to guard the threshold of India; to draw grain supplies from the valley of the Euphrates; and to prevent the Turks from using the Baghdad–Basra railway link to deliver troops and supplies to the theatre of war.

With the standing Egyptian army in check, its staff officers playing squash in Cairo while the junior officers led doomed campaigns against the Turks in Sinai, and the British government under duress in Europe, the best that Whitehall could do was to send commands to India with a view to preserving Britain's interests in the Middle East. In anticipation of Turkish hostilities, India had already sent a Poona Brigade to the Persian Gulf, which subsequently captured Fao, the Turkish fort and cable station at the mouth of the Basra river, and drove the enemy back up the Tigris. Soon two divisions of the Indian army would make further progress in Mesopotamia, under their commander General Nixon, finally capturing Nasiriyeh.

The British government in India had its own reasons for alienation from Westminster. In his memoirs
My Indian Years
, the then Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, writes of his conviction that it was in Flanders that the war would be won, and there that London should have concentrated its efforts and terminated the war. He describes the continual demands of the home government for the government of India to send troops, war matériel and supplies to France, East Africa, the Dardanelles, Salonica, and elsewhere. Enumerating the efforts made in India to meet the increasing demands of the War Office, he cites the recruitment of 300,000 Indian troops, and the supply of 70 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 60,000 rifles, 550 guns, plus tents, boots, clothing, and saddlery. By the time the war reached Mesopotamia, India was, in his words, “bled white” and had hardly anything more to give. The hint of an Arab uprising sent his blood pressure rocketing. It was quite impossible, and if it ever succeeded, it would bring havoc to India. He would never support the ambitions of the Sunni Muslim Sharif of Mecca, with all the problems his further elevation would bring from the Shia Muslim sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf maintained by India.

In India, the Viceroy ruled the largest population of Muslims in the world, and the demands made on him by the War Office were already causing considerable difficulty. The Turkish army was almost entirely Muslim—Turks and Arabs recruited from the desert. Sending Indian army troops, many of them Muslims, to fight the Turks in Mesopotamia meant that the British were effectively pitting Muslim soldier against Muslim soldier. This was further complicated by the allegiance that Indian Muslims gave to the traditional ruler of Ottoman Turkey, the Caliph. For the Viceroy it was therefore beyond comprehension that Britain should invite even more dissension among Muslims by promoting an Arab revolt against the Turkish Muslim regime. India's prominent pan-Islamic institutions, Kudam-I-kaaba and the Central Committee of All India Muslims, were pro-Turkish. On the North-West Frontier, too, an Arab revolt would bring universal condemnation. At present, as British cipher messages from Simla to London pointed out, they had succeeded in securing a precarious peace and quiet throughout these hotspots of civil unrest and religious fervour. For the moment, the Colonial Office was in agreement with the Viceroy that an Arab revolt would not be helpful; London and Delhi were convinced that in any case it would never materialize, and that if it ever did, it would be doomed to failure.

Nevertheless, by the spring of 1915 Lawrence was itching to leave map-making and return to the sphere of action. He had formulated a plan “to roll up Syria by way of the Hedjaz in the name of the Sherif . . . we can rush right up to Damascus, and biff the French out of all hope of Syria.” To him “it felt like morning, and the freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us.” For Gertrude, with her aching heart, it felt very different. Devastated by the death of the man she had loved, worn thin from reorganizing and running the Wounded and Missing Offices, the Gertrude who had arrived in Cairo was a wounded creature. At the turn of the year she reflected on the emotional turmoil that had been 1915, and wrote first to Florence and then to her father a heartbroken lament for Doughty-Wylie. Sometimes she prayed that she would never have to bear another year like the last, and sometimes she found herself thinking that it had all been worth it for those few days of happiness:

I wonder, if I could choose, whether I would not have the past year again, for the wonder it held, and bear the sorrow again. And dearest, not least of
all the wonder would be your kindness and love . . . I don't speak of these things now; it's best to keep silence. But you know that they are always in my mind.

Darling, darling Father . . . there never could be words in which to say to you what you have been to me. No one has helped another as you have helped me, and to tell you what your love and sympathy meant is more than I know how to do . . . I still can't write of it; but you know, don't you?

Her recent depression and overwork resulted, towards the end of January, in a brief physical collapse. Most unusually, she complained of exhaustion, and to remedy it she began getting up early in order to ride out into the desert for a morning gallop. It would be the last time she admitted to looking back. Work, as always, was to be her renaissance, and as always she subordinated her feelings to the job in hand. Keep silence as she might, it is more than likely that she talked of her loss and sorrow with Lawrence, who was also in mourning for his beloved brother Will, a pilot who had joined the Royal Flying Corps and been shot down in September just before Gertrude's arrival. Lawrence, perhaps with Hogarth and Woolley, may have helped her to pay her final respects at Doughty-Wylie's grave. In any case, she now got to know and appreciate the fine qualities, as well as the considerable shortcomings, of this unusual colleague. Gertrude and her “dear boy” became friends. The two were destined to become the Bureau's most famous recruits, pursuing their dreams and realizing them against all odds. Lawrence would be the first to live his legend, and when she heard of his exploits, she would pause over her mounds of paperwork and long for freedom and action again.

As an agency of the British government, the ultimate aim of the Bureau had to be winning the war. They knew that an Arab rebellion against the Turks was their only hope, and they knew that it was a possibility. By 1914 disaffection was common among the Arabian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Gertrude in her conversations with the Jebel Druze as early as 1905 had noted the beginnings of a movement towards independence. The people of Najaf and Karbala had turned against the Turks in Mesopotamia, and the Arab Independence Movement had begun in Basra, although this was being engineered by the unscrupulous Sayyid Talib chiefly for his own ends. At the same time, the Bureau knew perfectly well that pan-Arab independence was impossible. Allegiance
amongst all tribes in the Middle East? It was hard enough to get two sheikhs to sit down together! Gertrude set out the reasons in one of her crystal-clear information papers:

Political union is a conception unfamiliar to a society which is still highly coloured by its tribal origins and maintains in its midst so many strongly disruptive elements of tribal organization . . . The conditions of nomad life have no analogy with those of the cultivated areas and not infrequently the direct interests of the tribes are incompatible with those of the settled areas . . . It is well to dismiss from the outset the anticipation that there exists any individual who could be set up as a head or a figure-head for the Arab provinces as a whole . . . The sole individual who might be regarded as a possible figure-head is the King of the Hejaz, but though he might become the representative of religious union among the Arabs, he would never have any real political significance. Mesopotamia being preponderately Shi'ah, his name carries no weight there . . . His religious position is an asset; it is probably the only element of union which can be found. But it cannot be converted into political supremacy.

The fact remained that there was only one inducement for the tribes to unite against the Turks and counter their call to anti-British Jihad—the duty to respond to a call to fight for God—and that was the notion of Arab freedom and independence . . . or something like it. There was already the half-promise of that outcome, made by Kitchener, which could not be disowned. The issue was further compromised by the Hussain–McMahon correspondence. Every one of the Arab Bureau personnel knew that in their efforts to raise a revolt they would be living a half-lie. For Lawrence and Gertrude particularly, with their respect and love for the Arabs, it was a dilemma that would occupy them for the rest of their lives. Lawrence would inscribe his legend across the Hejaz with the agonizing sense of betraying his Arab friends, and admit it more than once in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
:

The Arab Revolt had begun on false pretences. To gain the Sherif's help our Cabinet had offered, through Sir Henry McMahon, to support the establishment of native governments . . . the Arabs . . . asked me, as a free agent, to endorse the promises of the British Government . . . I could see that if we
won the war the promises to the Arabs were dead paper . . . Yet the Arab inspiration was our main tool in winning the Eastern war . . . but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed.

Gertrude had no intention of taking any action of which
she
would be ashamed. She would use her brilliant intellect and her formidable ability to deliver that promise to the Arabs. She would change hearts and minds, she would explain every aspect and ramification of the issue to its best advantage, she would blend British administration with Arab self-determination and pride and do her best to see good government established. She would find a way to establish an Arab state alongside a benevolent British administration and produce genuine political cohesion.

Gertrude and Lawrence were not alone in their wish for self-determination for the Arabs, bolstered and stabilized by British advisers. While the “think tank” that was the Arab Bureau believed to a man that the multiplicity of races and tribes and beliefs made it impossible to form a single coherent nation with effective political institutions, they were pragmatic men of integrity. They would resist all attempts by India to annex Mesopotamia and to substitute the Raj for the Ottoman Empire. While the British in India had been able to tap into and dominate a universal Indian system based on the rule of the maharajahs, the Middle East allowed of no such easy entry. The Arab system derived from descent from the Prophet and other figures of religious pre-eminence, and it was from this that the leading families drew their moral and temporal power. Their hold over their sources of wealth was sufficient for them to extend patronage to lesser leaders and their tribes. Gertrude's grasp of the situation and her political acumen, her persuasive clarity in presenting issues of enormous complexity, were most valuable additions to the collective determination of the Bureau to find the way ahead.

Clear thinking, though, was somewhat hard to come by. As one commentator points out, there were around twenty separate government and military departments involved at any one time in the formulation of British policy in the Middle East during the First World War: the War Cabinet, the Admiralty, and the War Office each had their own point of view; there were the rival India Office and Foreign Office; then the bureaucracies
in India, Egypt, and the Sudan, which also had plenty to say on the subject. Three major expeditionary forces were stationed in Mesopotamia, Ismailia, and Alexandria, and there were naval and political establishments in four other major areas. No wonder there were crossed lines of communication, and that the promises made to the Arabs should differ in content and intention. Indeed, the Anglo-Arab understanding would be beset with misunderstandings, deriving principally from that initial correspondence between McMahon and Sharif Hussain, and the retrogressive Anglo-French agreement rattled off by the intemperate Sykes and France's Georges-Picot in May 1916, of which Gertrude and her then boss would not be informed for a further two years.