CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Pleasant Sunday Afternoons of Miss Gertrude Bell, or the “P.S.A.’s,” as the British officers called them, began in the middle of May 1920. After breakfast and a morning ride, Gertrude returned home to decorate her garden. Stringing old Baghdad lanterns around the trees, she arranged a circle of chairs and waited eagerly for her male guests to arrive. Along with Balfour, Bonham Carter and a few other officials, thirty of the city’s Arab political intelligentsia, most of them supporters of Faisal and the Sharifian family, strolled in. Over cold drinks, fruit and cake, they discussed the political issues of the day: Zionism and the Balfour Declaration, the Anglo-French Declaration, Mosul and the Turkish question, the mandate. Most important of all, they expressed their own hopes and fears. If trouble was in the air, Gertrude believed, it was better to hear it firsthand. “A capital plan,” Balfour called it. Knowing that Wilson might object to her meetings, she had asked him in advance whether he approved. “I like to have a foot in both camps,” he replied.
No Arab guest could have been more welcome than the one who arrived the following week: on Sunday, May 23, her former servant Fattuh appeared on her doorstep. He had served as driver for a man from his home town of Aleppo, and, after a harrowing ride through the desert, dodging robbers who still prowled the sands, had made his way at once to Gertrude’s house. She welcomed him with hugs, and almost immediately he inquired of her father. “Is His Excellency the Progenitor still with you?” he asked.
“How did you know he has been here?” she responded, surprised.
“Oh,” said Fattuh, “one of the Bedouin in the desert told me that the Khatun was well and her Father was with her.”
“So,” Gertrude wrote to Hugh, “I suppose it’s the talk of Arabia.” She missed her father badly, thinking of him as she passed the railway station, remembering their train rides up and down the country, how they had shared a thermos of tea and discussed the wealth of antiquities, the dearth of local leadership, the daily problems with Wilson. Her adversary had been made a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, an honor slightly higher than her own. The hurt came through even as she wrote: “I’m very glad. He well deserves it. I confess I wish that in giving him a knighthood they could also endow him with the manners knights are traditionally credited with!”
The loyal Fattuh could not have come at a better time. Outdoors the temperature was still a tolerable 100 degrees at the end of May, but in the mosques the heat was rising. Eighteen months had gone by since the Anglo-French Declaration, the mandate already had been declared, yet there was still no sign of an Arab government. Now Ramadan, the month-long holy period of daylight fasting, was under way, and the mujtahids, the highest Shiite authorities, were using their pulpits to stir a jihad. In the past the Sunnis had looked askance at such preachings of holy war, worried that they would lead to an Islamic state. But for the first time in anyone’s memory, Sunni townsmen and Shiite tribesmen put aside their bitter prejudices and joined together against a common enemy: the British. “The underlying thought,” Gertrude explained, “is out with the infidel.” When one young hothhead made wild speeches, Frank Balfour, Governor of Baghdad, had him arrested. Gertrude thought he was probably right, but, she acknowledged, “it is always a delicate line of decision.” As was so often the case, his arrest only fed the fire.
The following evening, May 30, 1920, a mob of townsmen gathered at the large mosque on New Street. Worried about a riot, Balfour sent two armored cars to patrol the streets. When an Arab instigator threw a rock at one of the uniformed drivers, the driver drew his revolver. Gertrude heard the gun shots from her bed. In the morning, the Arab who came daily to inform her of all the meetings told her the driver had fired over the heads of the crowd, but one blind Muslim had been run over; the rest of the throng had scattered quickly. That day Balfour called in the leaders: the mosques were not to be used for political speeches, he ordered. But the damage had been done. The nationalist urge, egged on by extremist propaganda from Syria, and coupled with the British Government’s refusal to present proposals for a constitution, brought on a rash of violent demonstrations. A general strike was declared, and as Gertrude walked to work through the bazaar, she found the shops shuttered and business ground to a halt.
On June 3, 1920, Wilson spoke with the new army commander, General Sir Aylmer Haldane (he had replaced General MacMunn who had been sent to India) and warned him that trouble was expected in the lower Euphrates “within a few weeks.” To Wilson the coming disturbance only underscored his belief that the Anglo-French Declaration was ill advised and that the Arabs were incapable of governing themselves.
Fiery rumors were spreading like a flame on kerosene, burning nationalist ambition as far away as the mosques in Karbala and the mud huts in Basrah. Reports that the Arabs under Abdullah were on their way from Syria encouraged the nationalist hopes of the northern tribes. But the same tales incensed the Shiites in the south, who resented the presumption that they were to be governed by a stranger and a monarch, sparking a series of raids across the Euphrates.
Fattuh brought Gertrude the gossip from the coffee houses, where he heard bitter complaints about her colleague Colonel Leachman. The Political Officer had been sent to Dulaim, known for its dangerous raids, to keep a watch on any instigators. Leachman had been well known as an adventurer and traveler but his tactics were rough; his snarling attitude had made him an enemy of the tribes. Word was out that they despised him. Ignoring Wilson’s rude manner, Gertrude passed on the information to him.
On June 4, the Shammar, the most powerful of the three northern Sunni tribes that roamed the desert between the Euphrates and the Tigris, attacked Tel Afar, a city forty miles to the west of Mosul. The Shammar sheikhs, led by Jamil Maidfai, announced falsely that Abdullah was on the march to Baghdad to proclaim himself King. Using that as justification for rebellion, they urged the local Arabs to show their alliance with the Arab nationalists and kill any Englishmen they could find. Six men were murdered: two clerks, two drivers, the Levy Officer, Captain Stuart, who had won an award for distinguished service during the war, and the Assistant Political Officer, Captain Barlow. Wilson responded at once.
He ordered the areas to be machine-gunned, the insurgents imprisoned and their leaders deported. The residents of the town were all turned out of their houses, and every house was destroyed. Nor would the British allow the town to be rebuilt. It was a punishment Wilson would use again and again.
The same day that the news came in about the murders, Gertrude was having lunch with General Haldane. To the irritation of the civil administrators, the general was about to take his high command on holiday in Persia and would not be back until October. After chatting about common acquaintances in London, Gertrude got up to leave. If news reached him that the tribes had taken Baghdad, would he return before October? she asked.
The general shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I don’t feel any responsibility for what happens while I’m away,” he replied.
The shock over Haldane’s indifference served as a momentary bond between Gertrude and Wilson. They both viewed him with disgust. But just as quickly, it underlined their disagreements: while Wilson wanted to see the British military presence strengthened, Gertrude wanted to see an Arab government installed. She wished the Arabs would settle for the cultivated Abdullah as Emir. That would solve everyone’s dilemma, including the British who opposed self-rule. Then, the Iraqi leaders advising Faisal in Damascus—including Jafar al Askari and Nuri Said—should quickly be brought back to Iraq to set up the government; they were “capable men with considerable experience,” she noted. “If we meet them on equal terms there won’t be any difficulty in getting them to act with wisdom.”
In Baghdad a clique of nationalists approached Wilson, who arranged a meeting on June 7, inviting not just them but all the leading notables—Muslims, Jews and Christians—to attend. Standing tall, his dark eyes penetrating the crowd, Wilson expressed regret at the delay in establishing a civil government. It was beyond the control of the British, he told them, using the excuse that although the mandate had been declared at the beginning of May, the terms of the mandate had not yet been defined. Nevertheless, he warned, if the delegates incited the people to riot, it would only lead to dangerous and uncontrollable results, which could end with all their hopes destroyed. The delegates responded by demanding the immediate formation of a committee to draw up proposals for an Arab government as promised in 1918. Wilson answered that as soon as the terms of the mandate had been formulated, steps should be taken to summon a Constitutional Assembly. They would be consulted on the future form of Government, he promised. With that, he left.
Fattuh reported that from the talk he heard in the coffee houses the meeting had been a success. “A.T.’s speech took the wind out of the sails” of the extremists, Gertrude wrote with relief, and the general talk “was that the town had made a fool of itself.” Indeed, when Wilson flew in an air force plane the next day to Hillah and Najaf, he found that no one was even interested in joining the rebellion. “Meantime,” Gertrude observed, “our opponents are now quarrelling busily among themselves.” The alliance between the Shiites and the Sunnis was broken.
In a note to General Haldane, she wrote that “the bottom seems to have dropped out of the agitation.” From the coffee house talk, the daily visits of her informers and “heart to heart interviews,” she had heard that “most of the leaders seem only too anxious to let bygones be bygones.” Calm seemed to prevail. The end of Ramadan, near at hand, would put a stop, she hoped, to the heated meetings taking place in the mosques. General Haldane ignored Wilson’s earlier advice and listened instead to Miss Bell; he ordered his army to take no further military action.
In the hope of encouraging the moderate Arabs, Gertrude slipped some secret documents about a constitutional government to an influential Arab nationalist. Meeting with Wilson in his office the following day, she casually mentioned what she had done. A.T. flew into a rage. Your indiscretions are intolerable, he berated her. You shall never see another paper in the office. Miss Bell apologized. “You’ve done more harm than anyone here,” Wilson went on. “If I hadn’t been going away myself I should have asked for your dismissal months ago—you and your Emir!” he snapped, choking with rage.
Wilson’s behavior infuriated her. “I know really what’s at the bottom of it,” she wrote to her father, referring to her Syrian report. “I’ve been right and he has been wrong; I need not say I’ve been at much pains not to point it out, but it’s all on paper.”
It was time for Wilson to leave, she told Hugh. He had never supported the official policy of Arab self-government laid down in the 1918 Anglo-French Declaration; “he has in fact always ignored it. The people know that he isn’t in sympathy with it and don’t trust him.
“Meantime,” she admitted, “it may be I who goes. But I shall not send in my resignation. I shall only go if I am ordered. Thank heaven Sir Percy will be here next week, on his way to England, so I can consult him if necessary.”
Ramadan ended in the middle of June 1920, but the tribes still bellowed with defiance. When Gertrude rode out one morning to visit her Shiite friend Haji Naji, she found him in a state of agitation. The extremists had roughed him up and threatened him with more if he did not join the insurrection. Haji Naji had refused and had protected his house with watchmen, but he was worried. He begged her to come and visit more often. She would come “constantly,” she promised.
In several towns placards covered the bazaar, urging the people to rise up against the British. In the holy city of Karbala, where thousands of pilgrims had gathered for the Id al Fitr, the feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan, Islamic agitators whipped the people into a frenzy while a group of sheikhs and notables plotted a revolt for an Islamic state. In Kadhimain the son of the holy man Gertrude had visited was now firing up the town. Near Najaf a small tribe, known for stealing from Persian pilgrims, was robbing everyone on the road. In the north two large tribes attacked each other in a major raid; and along the southern Euphrates near Diwaniyah, the tribes, bombed from the air for refusing to pay their taxes, were now in open rebellion and had cut the railroad line in three places. Wilson responded by bombing villages, burning houses, machine-gunning insurgents, deporting instigators and imprisoning activists.
Wilson’s tactics were too harsh, Gertrude believed. In fact, they functioned like a pressure cooker: the more he bore down on the insurgents, the more their fury increased. But Gertrude was in the minority. At the office she was shunned for being too soft on the Arabs; Wilson spoke to her brusquely and refused to eat with her in the mess.
Within a few weeks the rebellion was in full bloom. Trouble had spread to Rumaithah, where Major Daly, the Political Officer in the southern Euphrates region, had arrested two leading local personalities and sent them down to Basrah by train. Knowing where they were, the Euphrates tribes attacked the train, rescued the prisoners and cut the railway lines. When two hundred troops were sent in to help the stranded soldiers, the Arabs captured at least one relief train and grabbed the guns on board. With only a limited number of railroad cars in Mesopotamia, the British resorted to airplanes, flying low and dropping food supplies for the troops. But the Arabs used the captured guns to shoot at the planes. “As far as I can make out,” Gertrude wrote, “the matter was pretty badly handled at the beginning, partly no doubt, because the whole of G.H.Q. was up in the Persian hills and refused to realise the importance of the rising.”
But if she blamed the army for doing little about the uprising, Wilson and his staff blamed Gertrude. Her earlier assurance to General Haldane, that there would be no more trouble, now cost her dearly with her colleagues. Wilson claimed their loyalty and admiration, and like him, they treated Gertrude with contempt. The Political Officers were solidly against her sympathy for Arab independence. In their view, Wilson’s tough policy was exactly right; Gertrude was mush in the hands of the Arabs. The Mesopotamians’ cry for independence only irritated their British colonialist ears. It was not accidental that The Times called Wilson “a sun-dried bureaucrat set on Indianizing Mesopotamia.”