CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On instructions from the British Government, General Allenby had appointed Faisal, the son of the Sharif Hussein, as the new ruler of Syria (including the interior cities of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, but excluding Beirut and the rest of coastal Lebanon). According to the terms of the Sykes-Picot pact, however, as Allenby explained to Faisal, Syria would be within the sphere of influence of France. The Sharifian prince would rule with Arab governors and an Arab administration, but his rule would be under French supervision. His government would have an Arab flag, but it would also have French advisers; its finances and its policies would be driven directly by France.
Faisal had been given a different scenario. The commander of the Arab Revolt had been promised by T. E. Lawrence, his trusted British liaison, military and political adviser and friend, that the only outside influence in Syria would belong to the delicate hand of the British. But with little choice, a reluctant Faisal agreed to do what Allenby asked. Disgusted (and embarrassed by his own deceits), Lawrence requested home leave and left Damascus immediately. An anxious Faisal, disappointed and worried over the role of the French, stayed on to rule.
In Iraq, reports from neighboring countries were scarce, and the news from Reuters, at the beginning of 1919, that Faisal had been proclaimed the Arab ruler of Syria, came as a surprise. The idea of an Arab king heightened the fears of Christians and Jews that they would be exploited by the Muslims; it raised doubts among those whose wealth had depended upon the Turks, upon the British or upon the French; and it fired the ambitions of those who strove for Arab rule. Fueling the mixed emotions were the reports that Faisal was representing his father as King of the Arabs at the international peace talks, begun in Paris.
Before leaving Baghdad, Gertrude summed up the political information she had garnered and composed a major memorandum. In Self-Determination in Mesopotamia, her weighty report, dispatched by Wilson to the India Office, she noted that prior to the release of the Anglo-French Declaration of Arab liberation, most Iraqis had accepted the idea “that the country would remain under direct British control.” The publication of this declaration, however, “opened up other possibilities which were regarded almost universally with anxiety, but gave opportunity for political intrigue to the less stable and more fanatical elements.”
On one side of the Iraqi tug-of-war stood the groups whose self-interests lay with the British. At the other end were the nationalists who wanted British forces withdrawn (or overthrown) so that the Arabs could rule themselves.
Sooner or later, Gertrude noted, a nationalist party would have sprung to life. But as a result of the Anglo-French Declaration, it had happened sooner. Its early appearance, however, pushed “the stable elements” that opposed Arab nationalism (fearing it as extremist) to take cover under the British flag.
Of those who identified with the British, one man, in particular, stood out. The Naqib of Baghdad, religious leader of the Sunnis, influential as far away as India and China, had been a wise and reliable friend for years, and although the holy man refused to make any public statements on the subject of politics, he confided his feelings to Gertrude. Firmly opposed to an Arab emir, he believed the country was not yet ripe for any form of Arab rule. He emphasized the need of British troops to maintain the peace and hoped that a British administration would slowly incorporate Arabs into its government. Only over time, he believed, could the rivalrous factions—townsmen versus tribesmen, Sunnis versus Shiites, pro-British versus pan-Arabists—come together, and only over time could the Iraqis learn to rule themselves.
On the polite orders of the British military, the well-to-do Naqib had lent his large residence on the river to the occupying officials. He was now ensconced in his smaller house opposite the great Gailani mosque, where the tomb of his revered ancestor, the Islamic theologian Abdul Qadir al Gailani, was encased in silver. Gertrude had requested a meeting with the Naqib, and on February 6, 1919, she paid him a call.
She climbed the familiar courtyard staircase to the balconied first floor, entered his whitewashed study and made her way toward one of the hard white sofas that lined the perimeter of the room. Through the windows she could see the courtyard garden planted with orange trees, and under one corner window inside the room, where the devout man liked to sit, a book had been left on a small, white cloth-covered table. The Naqib’s grown son entertained her for a while, and then the holy man appeared; she stood to greet him. Old and white-bearded, his body bent by rheumatism, his figure cloaked in a long black robe layered over white, his head covered with a white turban wrapped around a red Turkish fez, he moved slowly toward her and, giving orders not to be disturbed, welcomed her warmly and settled himself on a hard settee.
She had known the Naqib since her earliest trips to Baghdad, and she had called on him almost at once when she arrived to work for Cox in April 1917. Now they talked about her departure for England and about the future of Iraq: they discussed the French, whose culture he loved but whose government he despised, and contrasted them with the British, whose government he admired and whose policies he considered firm and fair; to her delight she heard him say that he hoped they would stay and rule in Iraq.
“Khatun,” he spoke in Arabic, “your nation is great, wealthy and powerful; where is our power? … You are the governors and I am the governed. And when I am asked what is my opinion as to the continuance of British rule, I reply that I am the subject of the victor. You, Khatun, have an understanding of statecraft. I do not hesitate to say to you that I loved the Turkish government when it was as I once knew it. If I could return to the rule of the Sultans of Turkey as they were in former times, I should make no other choice. But I loathe and hate, curse and consign to the devil the present Turkish Government. The Turk is dead; he has vanished, and I am content to become your subject.”
Yet even he had reservations about a permanent British presence. The war was over, he said, wiping his hands with the words; it was time for the British to end their military rule; it was time for them to install a civil government. He knew she was going to Whitehall as an adviser, and he begged her to request that Kokus, Percy Cox, be returned to Baghdad. “There are a hundred and a thousand men in England who could fill the post of Ambassador in Persia,” he stated, “but there is none but Sir Percy Cox who is suitable for Iraq. He is known, he is loved and he is trusted by the people of Iraq. He is a man of sober years.” And commenting on A. T. Wilson, who had acted at London’s instructions, the Naqib continued, “I bear witness that if Sir Percy Cox had been in Baghdad we would have been spared the folly of asking the people to express their wishes as to the future.”
The old man told her exactly what she should say when she appeared at Whitehall: “We wish to be governed by Sir Percy Cox.” But, he advised, “do not say, even though it be true, that you yourself have become a Baghdadi and that your mind is wholly occupied with the welfare of Iraq, for that will cause your words less weight in London and we shall have the less profit from you.”
He went on to discuss the notion of self-determination, a thoughtless idea, he believed, which he blamed on the American President. “Does Sheikh Wilson know the East and its peoples?” he asked rhetorically. “Does he know our way of life and our habits of mind? You English have governed for three hundred years in Asia and your rule is an example for all men to follow. Pursue your own way. Do not submit to guidance from Sheikh Wilson. Knowledge and experience are your guides.”
Gertrude drew the discussion back to recent events in Baghdad. “Most of those who have spoken against you are men without name or honor,” the Naqib said. “But I tell you to beware of the Shi’ahs. I have no animosity against the Shi’ah sect,” he hastened to assure her. She nodded and gave him no hint of her own underlying doubts. “They love and respect me,” he continued, “and I am regarded by them as their Sheikh. But turn your eyes on the pages of history and you will see that the salient characteristic of the Shi’ahs is their khiffah [volatility]. Did they not themselves murder Musa ibn Ali whom they now worship as a God? Idolatry and mutability are combined in them. Place no reliance upon them.”
The conversation had reached the point where Gertrude felt she could tread on tender soil. Like the Sharif Hussein, the Naqib was a Sunni and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Cautiously, she asked the holy man his opinion of the Sharif. The Naqib answered that they were distant relatives. “I come of the same stock and I share the same religious opinions,” he said. Nonetheless, he confessed, “I would never consent to the appointment of himself or of his son as Emir.” The Sharifians were strangers to Iraq, he explained; they came from the Hejaz, in Central Arabia, an environment totally foreign to Iraq. “The Hejaz is one and the Iraq is one, there is no connection between them but that of the Faith. Our politics, our trade, our agriculture are all different from those of the Hejaz.”
The holy man repeated that, as much as he hated the present secular, nationalist Turkish Government, he “would rather a thousand times have the Turks back in Iraq than see the Sharif or his sons installed here.”
What about the Naqib himself as ruler? Gertrude asked. Her hand was resting on the wooden arm of his sofa, and he tapped it reproachfully with his finger. Leaning forward, he said with a laugh, “How can you put such a question as that to me? It would be contrary to the deepest principles of my creed to become the political head of the State.” Besides, he added, “I am an old man. These five or six years which remain to me I wish to spend in reflection and in study.” Then, raising his voice, he emphasized: “Not if it were to save Iraq from complete destruction would I alter what I have now spoken.” She accepted his no for an answer. Despite all her experience in the Arab world, she did not consider the possibility that he was waiting for her to insist.
They talked for ninety minutes before Gertrude begged his permission to leave. The Naqib expressed his personal affections and reminded her of their long friendship. She valued it greatly, she answered, and thanked him for his confidence. He hoped that she would regard him as her father, he said touchingly, and prayed that she would return soon from England. With that, he bade her go in peace.
Whitehall promised to “take no action if they can avoid it until Miss Bell arrives,” so she left Baghdad, heading not yet for England, but for France. There, at the Paris Peace Conference, the leaders of Europe were meeting to divide the spoils of the First World War and carve up the remains of three empires: Austro-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. At A. T. Wilson’s request, Gertrude would make sure that when the talk turned to Mesopotamia, British interests would be well represented. But that would prove more complex than the Acting Civil Commissioner had believed: Lawrence and Faisal, who had fought side by side in the desert battle against the Turks, were now fighting side by side in the political battle against the Allies. They were already in Paris, and Gertrude’s opinions would soon swerve away from Wilson and swing toward them.
The journey to Europe went via Egypt. Gertrude sailed on the Ormonde, and on the morning her boat docked at Port Said, she dressed with great anticipation. She slipped on her calf-length dress, topped her hair with a flowered hat and waited excitedly for David Hogarth. Her friend and former mentor, traveling from Cairo to see her, found her “more affectionate than ever,” looking “a little older,” he wrote to his wife, “but still wonderfully alive and well turned out.” They spent two hours together, clarifying some questions he had, discussing her mandate to Whitehall.
Gertrude reached Paris on the seventh of March 1919. The French capital was electric, glittering with power and charged with the current of international conspiracy. Each nation had come with its own agenda: the Italians to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the French to disarm the Germans, regain Alsace and Lorraine and the Saar region and gain their share of the Ottoman Empire (including control of Syria); the British to win the German colonies in Africa and the South Pacific, keep control of Mesopotamia, have protectorates in Persia and Egypt and see the end of German naval power; the Americans to establish their dream of a League of Nations. And, in addition, each one wanted control over oil. The highest officials of every country had arrived, blocking the streets with their hired cars, booking up tables at Fouquet’s and the Pré Catalan, chattering at the Paris Opéra and enlivening the hotel lobbies with the buzz of global schemes. “It was a gathering of the nations such as the world had never seen or dreamed of before,” wrote Domnul Chirol, who had come from London in January at the opening of the winter conference on behalf of the British Government to lobby the French press.
The inner circle of white-haired leaders was meeting every day at the Elsyeé Palace on the Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré. Armed with heavy leather pouches and giving off a whiff of violet hair wash, the Council of Ten, accompanied by military aides, interpreters and advisers, paraded along parquet floors through thick double doors to the plushly carpeted study of the French Foreign Minister. In M. Picot’s splendid paneled chamber, where the smell of typewriter ribbons and polished furniture mixed with the scent of secrecy, chandeliers blazed and draperies of red damask were drawn tight so that not a sound nor a signal escaped from the privileged room. A long baize table, covered with blotting papers, tracing tissue and maps, was lined with facing rows of great gilt armchairs, behind which two more rows of little gold seats were reserved for secretaries and advisers.
At the head of the vast stretch of green-covered table, with his back to a glowing fire of huge logs, sat the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, dressed like all the others in a black wool suit, starched white collar and crisp white cuffs. With his gray-gloved hands resting on the arms of his seat, he rose to address the group, and with his head thrown back and his shoulders hunched, he spoke. Out of his droopily mustachioed mouth he hurled his words, slowly and deliberately at first, then faster, like the rat-a-tat of a machine gun. When a resolution had already been drafted, he stated it, refused to hear any discussion, and with his phrases still reeling toward his confreres, he announced, “Adopté,” and sat down, the half-closed eyes under his bushy eyebrows surveying the room.
On either side of the Tiger sat the magnetic British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in town with his mistress, Frances Stevenson; and the enigmatic American President, Woodrow Wilson, whose idealistic thoughts were purely on his new concepts of the League of Nations and the mandate system. “The peoples of the world are awake and the peoples of the world are in the saddle,” Wilson would declare, hoping to spur the former territories of the Germans and the Turks to self-determination.
Down the line from Clemenceau were leaders of Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, China, Japan, Australia—the only missing country being Russia. The proceedings were as formal as the gardens below the tall windows on the far side of the room, and the ministers’ discussions as delicate as the snowflakes that fell outside. The conversation centered on Europe; the East was only a sideshow.
In fact, the delegates sneered at the notion of self-government for either Mesopotamia or Syria, and an often-repeated conversation was overheard among four very high officials:
1st Minister: “I fear that the country may be badly governed.”
2nd Minister: “The country will be badly governed.”
3rd Minister: “The country ought to be badly governed.”
In the end, neither Syria nor Mesopotamia would be given immediate autonomy; instead, like other regions of the Turkish Empire, they would be placed under the mandate of Britain or France, which hoped to use Wilson’s concept to keep control of the region.
But before that fateful day, and while the discourse continued at the Elysée Palace, a few blocks away in their suites of the Hôtel Crillon the American delegation conferred, and at the Hôtel Majestic and the neighboring Astoria the British contingent held its private meetings. Under the potted palms in the lobbies, and in every corner of the private rooms, the flow of words was tinged with the quest for oil. Petroleum had become the substance of vital interest; without it the British, French and Americans never could have won the war. “The Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil,” proclaimed the British Secretary of State, Lord Curzon. It was evident that it had become a strategic necessity; national security now depended upon oil, and the leading figures of Britain were called to the conference for consultation. “Every day,” Chirol observed, “there was a constant coming and going of experts specially summoned from England, of legislators and jurists, of bankers and economists, of captains of industry and commerce, of all the best brains in fact which the country could muster.” On issues of the East, the potential source of that precious petroleum, Arthur Balfour, Arthur Hirtzel and Edwin Montagu huddled intently, while the exotic figure of Faisal, robed in flowing silks, moved like a graceful symbol through the corridors; at his elbow always was the small, odd figure of a khaki-suited, kafeeyah-clad T. E. Lawrence.
In the aftermath of the war, the Sharif Hussein, who, with his son Faisal had helped the British defeat the Turks, expected to be duly rewarded. His expressed desire was to create an Arab kingdom that included Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. He wanted the throne of the Hejaz, his Arabian turf, for himself, and he wanted two of his sons formally installed to the north: Faisal (already there) in Damascus; Abdullah, his eldest son, in Baghdad. If the French wanted to keep Lebanon, with its mostly Christian population, he might agree. But the French were not willing to give up any of Syria nor were the British delegates ready to hand over Iraq.
Faisal and Lawrence had come from London, where, on January 3, 1919, Faisal signed an agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on the principle of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Afterward they set off for Paris, where the three met again. With the help of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, General Allenby’s Chief of Intelligence and a member of the British team, Faisal composed a letter to Felix Frankfurter, head of the American Zionist delegation:
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race … [and] have suffered similar oppression at the hands of powers stronger than themselves.… We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.… We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome here.… People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need for co-operation of the Arabs and Zionists, have been trying to exploit the local difficulties that must necessarily arise in Palestine in the early stage of our movements.
The letter, signed by Faisal, became a fragment of a history torn apart by bitterness and tragedy.
It would take nearly thirty years of violent uprisings and a brutal war between the Zionists and the Arabs before the Jewish state would come into existence, in 1948, and almost a half-century more before the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine recognized each other’s right to a homeland. But this early letter is testament to the fact that the Hussein clan, alone among the Arab leaders, was well intentioned toward the Jews. Later, Faisal’s brother Abdullah, the first ruler of TransJordan, and his successor and grandson, King Hussein of Jordan, would make that clear in their readiness to accept a Jewish state.
But it was a far greater ambition that brought the desert prince Faisal to Paris. Together with Lawrence he set out to convince the French that, with his government already installed in Damascus, they should anoint him King of Syria. The Paris Peace talks had commenced on January 23, 1919, and within two weeks the colorful pair of Lawrence and Faisal was called to appear before the Council of Four. Lawrence, dressed in white robes and gold-braided headdress, had no official position; an eccentric at once flashy and shy, he held his only acknowledged role as Faisal’s translator. As an advocate for the Arab leader, he was a questionable character; to many in the British Foreign Service, he was not to be trusted. He had even been shunted off to the Continentale, a lesser hotel.
It was to the gold-robed Faisal that Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George and the Italian Premier, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, leaned forward and listened closely. Without notes, without hesitation, in a resonant voice and mesmerizing cadence, the Arab commander spoke. No one of Western origin, not even Lawrence, matched the Emir’s mystique. When Faisal opened his mouth, said an American lawyer at the talks, “his voice seemed to breathe the perfume of frankincense and to suggest the presence of richly coloured divans, green turbans and the glitter of gold and jewels.” He delivered his speech in Arabic, with Lawrence loosely translating, but the Turkish-educated Faisal stunned his audience by answering questions in colloquial French. Faisal’s presence had the force of an electromagnetic field, drawing in Lloyd George, who declared firmly that the British would not let down their Arab allies, repelling Clemenceau, who angrily reminded his English colleague of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The fate of that pact seemed oddly marked: only a few days earlier, on February 2, in the midst of an epidemic in Paris, Mark Sykes had died of the flu.
For several weeks the Eastern question was on the table. Faisal and Lawrence did all they could, beguiling, cajoling, even rattling sabers as Faisal threatened to rouse the Arabs of Syria and the Hejaz in a jihad against the French. But that not only angered the French; it infuriated the British, who were caught in a compromising position. They had made promises to both Faisal’s father, the Sharif Hussein, and the French, vowing that each would have control over Syria. Britain had no wish now to support either one in another costly war. The problem had reached an impasse: Faisal, the self-declared King, was insistent on keeping the throne; the French, who long ago had claimed their stake, were not about to give up Syria.
When Gertrude arrived at the Majestic on Easter Sunday 1919 to promote the Arab cause, she was introduced at once to the intriguing figure of Faisal. Few knew his background: his parents were cousins; his father, the guardian of Mecca; his mother, an Arab peasant from the same town. Born in the desert, he had been taken to Constantinople when his father was put under Ottoman watch. He grew up sickly. As a young man he picked at his food, smoked a great deal and developed a love of classical Arabic poetry, but along the way he also learned to shoot well and to ride horses and camels with the skill of the Bedouin he was. Tall, thin, darkly dramatic, a noble born of fine stock, he had the virile look of a desert Arab, the polished manners of a cosmopolitan Turkish pasha, the charm and charisma of a leader. Talking with Gertrude, he knew how to flatter her femininity, excite her with his own political ambitions.
They spoke for only a few minutes before Faisal went off for a meeting. Left with his doctor and his private secretary, Rustam Haidar (French-speaking like Faisal, educated at the Sorbonne), Gertrude told them what she had heard. Conditions in Syria were not good, her informers had said. Daily living had become more difficult. Faisal must make an agreement with the French, she advised. The Americans could not help, and the British did not want to interfere. Later, the two men repeated the conversation to Lawrence. “Miss Bell has a poor mind,” he retorted. “You should not attach any importance to what she says.” But Lawrence’s romantic attitude would fail Faisal in the end. Gertrude’s approach was far more pragmatic.
Exhilarated by Faisal and Lawrence (she had not heard his nasty remark) and by her own important role in representing Mesopotamia, Gertrude was swept up at once in the frenzy. The air was tainted with anxieties and conspiracies over the Arabs: muddled misunderstandings, complicated by the conflicting promises of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which gave Syria to the French), the McMahon-Hussein letters (which promised an Arab kingdom to the Sharif Hussein), and the Balfour Declaration (which promised a homeland in Palestine to the Jews). All these were further splattered with the need for oil; the purported petroleum wealth of Mesopotamia was causing much excitement. It left the loquacious Gertrude nearly speechless.
A few nights later, alone in her room, she sat at the desk and wrote to her father: “I’ve dropped into a world so amazing that up to now I’ve done nothing but gape at it without being able to put a word onto paper. I’m not going even now to tell you what it’s like partly because I can’t—but it is clearing up a little. Our Eastern affairs are complex beyond all words and until I came there was no one to put the Mesopotamian side of the question at first hand.” She had talked that day with Lord Milner, had plans to lunch with the questionable Mr. Balfour and utimately hoped to catch Mr. Lloyd George. “If I can manage to do so I believe I can enlist his sympathies.”
Her immediate task, she continued, was to speak to the French delegation. “The Mesopotamian settlement is so closely linked with the Syrian that we can’t consider one without the other,” she explained, “and in the case of Syria it’s the French attitude that counts.” There was so much to do, she needed help. A. T. Wilson was coming from Baghdad, and she suggested summoning Hogarth. As soon as they arrived she proposed to include them with herself and Mr. Lawrence to form a solid Near Eastern bloc. In the meantime she would tell her story to plenty of people in Paris, among them her friends Domnul Chirol and Sir Robert Cecil. And, despite his asides, T. E. Lawrence was at the top of her list as an ally.
If most British officials were repelled by Lawrence and his kinship with an Arab emir, Gertrude found him appealing. If most thought him difficult, she thought him dynamic; if most found him obstreperous, she found him enchanting. True, before the talks she had told a friend she thought Lawrence an “inverted megalomaniac,” but Lawrence alone could understand her passion for the East. After they dined with Domnul at the Paris home of The Times’s editor, Wickham Steed, she wrote admiringly to Hugh, praising T.E.L.’s explanation of the situation with Faisal and the Syrians on the one hand and the French on the other: “He did it quite admirably. His charm, simplicity and sincerity made a deep personal impression and convinced his listeners.”
Sometimes separately, sometimes together, Gertrude and Lawrence raced around town, from the Majestic to the Crillon to the Élysée Palace, rushing from one conference to another. After one frigid morning in the office of Arthur Hirtzel, where she huddled close to the hot water pipes and reading reports, Gertrude hurried to keep a lunch date with Lawrence. Standing in the hall together, they spied Lord Milner, a close adviser to Lloyd George. “You go and ask him to lunch with us,” Lawrence urged her. Boldly, she went up to the minister and invited him to join them. Milner said yes. It was a delightful lunch, unofficial and open, she reported, but realizing that he had said too much, Milner made them promise they would not quote him. “We assured him that people who lunched with us always were indiscreet,” Gertrude wrote. “It’s Mr. Lawrence, I think, who induces a sort of cards-on-the-table atmosphere.”
Lawrence laid his own cards on the table when he confided in Gertrude about the book he planned to write. He hoped it would clear up the myths promulgated by Lowell Thomas. He sought her advice on how to treat the tales: whether to embellish them with the stories that had surrounded him as the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, or to go with the lesser truth and be diminished by the facts. Ever the one for truth, Gertrude assured him his book was a splendid idea and encouraged him to proceed with his work on Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Gertrude was spending most of her time with Lawrence. When her father arrived for a weekend stay, she took him to lunch with her “beloved boy,” and they discussed the situation in Syria. Hugh, friendly with some of the Americans, introduced his daughter to President Wilson’s delegation and, during several days of lunches and dinners, she expounded on the Arabs, trying to teach the Americans something about the subject and persuade them to take over the mandate from the French. Temporarily, at least, the results seemed good: on March 25, the Americans announced they would send a commission to the region to study the situation. Upon hearing the news, the abstinent Faisal toasted them with champagne. “The Arabs would rather die than accept the French mandate,” he told an American delegate. (The American King-Crane Commission took three years to issue its report, keeping the United States out of the political hotbed until it was too late to have an impact on events.)
Just after her father left, Gertrude dined with Harold Nicolson. She had known Nicolson and his bride since 1914, when they were newlyweds in Constantinople. Now he was part of the British delegation, and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, had reluctantly agreed to join him briefly. Their marriage was beginning down its rough road. Vita, in the midst of a romance with Violet Markham, had refused to leave her lover; in three years more, she would begin her affair with Virginia Woolf. “Mrs. Vita was over for a day,” Gertrude scrawled. “She is a most attractive creature and would be more so if she didn’t whiten her nose so very white.”
Aside from such fluffy gossip, however, her talk stayed mainly in the realm of the East. Frantically working the hallways, lobbies, restaurants and conference rooms, grabbing the arm of anyone she could, she lectured him on the Arabs. She knew more about the desert and its people than anyone else, including Lawrence, said Domnul. When A. T. Wilson arrived on March 20, he immediately recognized how difficult her work was. Dismayed to discover how little was known about the region, he later wrote:
“Experts on Western Arabia, both military and civil, were there in force, but not one, except Miss Bell, had any first-hand knowledge of Iraq or Nejd or, indeed, of Persia. The very existence of a Shiah majority in Iraq was denied as a figment of my imagination by one ‘expert’ with an international reputation, and Miss Bell and I found it impossible to convince either the Military or the Foreign Office Delegations that Kurds in the Mosul vilayet were numerous and likely to be troublesome, that Ibn Saud was a power seriously to be reckoned with or that our problem could not be disposed of on the same lines as those advanced for Syria by the enthusiasm of the Arab Bureau.” Indeed, while Wilson was still in Paris, word arrived that the Assistant Political Officer posted in northern Mesopotamia had been ambushed and killed by the Kurds. The incident was dismissed, but it foreshadowed much trouble with the northern tribes.
Wilson’s accolades for Gertrude were but a momentary applause. As firmly as he believed that the only solution for Mesopotamia was a British High Commissioner, she was beginning to lean toward an Arab head of state. Numerous hours with Lawrence and Faisal had planted the seed that a Sharifian ruler was not only good for Syria; it was the best answer for Iraq.
Squalls of anger arose between the colonialist A. T. Wilson, fighting for the British to hold on to power, and Lawrence, whom he blamed for Britain’s problems with the French. Wilson sighed with relief when he learned that, at the end of the negotiations, Lawrence planned to return to England and retire. After the conference had ended, the oil agreements were made, the League of Nations was established, the remains of Eastern Europe were divided up and a covenant adopted that called for mandates over formerly Turkish territories, the delegates departed; but the Arab issue hovered like a giant question mark in the air. Little had actually been ensured; instead of putting Syria and Mesopotamia firmly into French and British hands, the negotiators, deeming the issue too difficult to settle, deferred, in true diplomatic style, for two years, to another time and another place.
Gertrude had left for Belgium to meet her father, where he had gone for a well-deserved rest. After a month she was finally back in London, catching up on new books, having fittings for new clothes. The styles had changed dramatically, as she had already discovered; the long dress lengths that she cherished were replaced by skirts just below the knee; the long evening gowns were now cut low in the back. She ordered one new dress fringed with ostrich feathers, the latest rage, and, instead of the old stiff fabrics, she tried on knitted silks and wool jerseys, worn with sheer stockings and the new pump-style shoes. At the milliner’s she chose a brimmed hat piled with plumes and one of the tricornes that had just come into vogue.
She shopped, she read, she dined with friends. It was four years since she had seen them, and one of her Oxford colleagues—David Hogarth’s sister, Janet—described her afterward: “She had aged a bit, her bright hair had silvered, and she looked like finely tempered steel.”
At the beginning of June 1919, Gertrude retreated to Rounton. On long walks with her father or when riding through the rolling fields, swimming, gardening or just talking with friends, she could work off the tensions of the long war and the current frazzle of Eastern politics. With time to reflect on what she had learned, she sat at the desk in her childhood room and wrote lengthily to Wilson, summing up:
“This letter has been all business but I am going to end with a little sentiment … all these things have happened since I last sat in this beautiful room of mine, lined with books and looking out on an exquisite country-side. I cannot recapture the former world which this room and its books stood for, nor can I ever quite lay to rest the anguish which lies between that world and this, but I can, and I do, accept with wonder and gratitude what the new world has given me, and in that you play a large part—you yourself, and the Service of which you have made me feel I am one.”
Toward the end of September, with her new wardrobe stashed in her trunks and her maid Marie in tow, she launched once again for the East. Sailing on the Nevasa, she dressed on a warm morning in comfortable muslin and searched for a place away from the other passengers. Finding a quiet spot, she stretched out on the wooden deck chair, took out her writing kit and penned a note to her father. “I’m glad to be plunged into Arab politics again and almost to think I’m a person,” she wrote. “It’s very curious to be part of the official East. I always used to wonder what it must be like to be coming on a ship of this kind and not to be an outsider. I find it quite amusing, not having had too much of it.”
She planned to return to Baghdad via Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo. It was important to examine the local problems for herself, to see and hear what the Arabs felt about the French, about the British, about the Turks, about the Zionists, about Arab nationalism. At the end of her trip to Egypt and Syria, she would write an official report. She had no idea of the trouble to come.