CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
An extraordinary few weeks followed in the wake of Faisal’s coronation. Like corks bobbing in on a sea of champagne, delegations organized by Gertrude pervaded the town. Only moments after the crowning ceremony, she returned to the Residency to find the corridors swarming with turbaned men, some of whom she had never met before, others who had never been to Baghdad. From the Qadir Agha of Shush, huge and fat in his baggy striped trousers, to the ten-year-old Archbishop of the Nestorians, wearing a huge gold cross around his neck, to the religious leader of the devil worshippers, they thronged her chamber, eager to devour information about the new King. “Fun isn’t it?” she asked her father, basking in the glow of her own success.
On Saturday of that first week, Faisal summoned Gertrude to a private tea. She spent “a happy hour” that day at the now-completed palace, a modest, two-story house close to the edge of the Tigris, where she and the King discussed a range of matters, from Ibn Saud’s worrisome raids to the west and south of Iraq, to the new national flag of the country, to the personal flag of the King. “We arranged provisionally this,” she wrote to Hugh, drawing a sketch on her note; “the Hejaz flag with a gold crown on the red triangle.… Do for heaven’s sake tell me whether the Hejaz flag is heraldically right.… Also whether you have a better suggestion for Faisal’s standard.”
They had become the closest of friends, the dark-skinned, black-bearded Arab Emir and the pink-cheeked, blue-eyed British lady, and while the charming King enfolded her in his flowing robes, the imperial Englishwoman protected them both with her parasol. Calling her constantly to the palace, he complimented her on her gowns and confided in her his deepest fears. He consulted with her on the settlement of tribal feuds (between the Anazeh and the Shammar), took her advice in choosing the members of his inner council, and depended on her to arrange the palace household. They picnicked, played tennis, attended the races, swam and took tea. And while a few flirtatious giggles passed between them, they spent most of their time working together to build a state.
“The week has been entirely occupied with subterranean agitation over the forming of the new Cabinet,” Gertrude reported to Hugh at the beginning of September 1921. “These first appointments are of extreme importance to Faisal because he will be judged by them. If he puts in figureheads, just because they are known to be safe men and loyal to us, all the ardent people,” she acknowledged, “will say the new Cabinet is a farce and Faisal not a King but a puppet of the English. On the other hand,” she recognized, “it should be staunch and steady.”
The choice of Cabinet members caused chaos in the ranks. British bickered with British, Arabs argued with British, and Arab nationalists, Shiite extremists and pro-Turkish politicians vied with one another for positions in the government. After her longtime friend the Naqib accepted the job of Prime Minister, and Jafar Pasha, Nuri Said and Sasun Effendi took their respective posts, the King conferred with Gertrude on the Minister of the Interior, “vacant,” she noted, “since Talib was bundled out.” They debated over Naji Suwaidi, well meaning enough for her and Mr. Cornwallis, but too unsteady for Percy Cox, and settled on Taufiq Khalidi, clever and well educated, but too pro-Turkish to have the complete confidence of Faisal. One of the leading pro-Turkish sheikhs was urging an uprising in the name of Islam.
With a beady eye on the proceedings of the Arab Government, she took charge of appointing the right man to be Treasurer to Faisal’s household and, without mentioning it to anyone but Cox, added a new portfolio, Ministry of Health, supplying a Christian physician from Mosul at its helm. “I must tell you in confidence that he is my appointment,” she revealed to Hugh; “everyone is delighted, but they don’t know it was I who did it.”
Her plans for Iraq were nothing less than grand. At tea with the King, in the reception room of the palace, she showed him first some photographs she had taken of him at a picnic, and then pulled out a map of Syria from The Times. Placing it in front of the monarch, she pointed out how the French had cut up the country into provinces.
“By God, it’s forbidden,” the King said scowling, swearing over the maps.
“There is only one hope for Syria,” Gertrude responded, knowing full well that Faisal still dreamed of ruling Damascus; “that we should sit quiet here and do our own job.” She turned to Jafar Pasha and Nuri Said, who had just arrived, and explained. “When we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there is not an Arab of Syria and Palestine who wouldn’t want to be part of it. Before I die,” she vowed, “I look to see Faisal ruling from the Persian frontier to the Mediterranean.”
To some, her endeavors appeared the efforts of a generous friend; to others, the hateful symbol of British imperialism or, worse, those of a female puppeteer pulling the strings behind the throne. But whatever their feelings, British and Arabs alike were calling her “the uncrowned queen of Iraq.” Faisal’s coronation was her own crowning achievement. Catching the attention of journalists, her name spread like a sandstorm around the world, from Arabia to Europe to America. Yet when, in July, an American newspaper published an article trumpeting her power, Gertrude winced, calling the publicity “unspeakable.”
“MESOPOTAMIA’S UNCROWNED QUEEN,” shouted the headline of the New York Herald:
Miss Gertrude Bell, Called Blessed by the Natives and All Wise by Downing Stret, Gives Invaluable Aid in Problems Arising from Mandate—English Ironmaster’s Daughter, Famed for Explorations and Later for First Line Service in War, Carries White Man’s Burden without Loss of Feminine Charms.
As “El Sitt,” “The Woman,” every Arab in the peninsula knows her. When you speak of “Gertrude” every Englishman from Cairo to Teheran knows whom you mean. And if he knows that middle eastern land too, that cradle of the race, he calls a fervent blessing on the name.
For in the Colonial Office in London, and in Baghdad, where Sir Percy Cox is trying to impose that newest fangled of Occidental governmental devices, the mandate, upon the oldest of all lands, she is the uncrowned Queen of Mesopotamia. She is Miss Gertrude Bell.
Bedouin sheiks and Bedouin beggars bless her—and call her wise. Learned university gentlemen who delve in the glories that were Sideon [sic] and the pomps that were Tyre admire her—and call her wise. People who design and sell the loveliest and the smartest of frocks in Hanover Square and the Rue de la Paix gladly give her of their best and call her wise. But when the tangled skeins of middle eastern affairs become inextricable at the nerve centre of the British Empire in Downing Street, they call in “Gertrude” and know that she is all-wise.
“Impertinent balderdash,” Gertrude retorted. “It’s not true that I’ve determined the fortunes of Iraq but it is true that with an Arab Government I’ve come into my own. It’s a delicate position to be so much in their confidence.”
She had become the subject of an Arabic children’s rhyme:
“Miss Bell
Rikbat trambell”
they chanted as they skipped down the street;
“Miss Bell
Rode in a motor car”
Their parents made their own verse:
“Miss Bell dhirtat fial dira
W’al hakim dhiay’a tadbira,”
commenting on her political power;
“Miss Bell farted in the district
And the high official lost his bearings.”
“One of the reasons you stand out so,” Nuri Said told Gertrude as he rode beside her on horseback, watching her return the salutes of villagers, “is because you’re a woman. There’s only one Khatun,” he explained. “It is like when Sidi Faisal was in London and always wore Arab dress, there was no one like him. So for a hundred years they’ll talk of the Khatun riding by.”
“I think they very likely will,” Gertrude remarked.
The telephone rang in her office later that September day, the voice on the other end asking her to dine with the King. Two Arab Ministers were already invited to her own house, but she called them quickly to cancel. “I think it’s best to treat Faisal’s invitation as commands,” she observed.
Dressed for the evening in her cloak and gown, Gertrude motored to the east bank of the Tigris and drove through the sandy entrance of the small brick palace. Curtsying, as always, before the King, she joined his three Arab guests. After dinner Faisal asked her to sit with him outdoors. On the balcony overlooking the river, the two friends smoked their cigarettes and spoke about the future. Thanks to a talk earlier in the day with Nuri Said, Gertrude now understood the sadness in Faisal’s face.
The object of scorn as a child, Faisal had suffered the unhappy fate of being a middle child. Squeezed between his brothers Abdullah and Ali, he had been derided, not only by them, but by his mother. After she died, Faisal became close to Zaid, the child of his father’s second marriage, creating even more of a gulf between him and Abdullah and Ali.
Faisal’s personality, calculating and profound, stood in sharp contrast to Abdullah’s candid, straightforward character. When Abdullah wanted something, he made it clear. But Faisal kept his intentions hidden and bore a gravitas that made him seem older than his years. It would be said later that when Abdullah died at the age of seventy, he looked fifty, but when Faisal died at the age of fifty, he looked seventy.
Now, as King of Iraq, Faisal was the target of of Abdullah and Ali’s envy. Feeling alienated and alone, and worried about troublesome signs in the country, he could hardly ignore the shadowy fact that it was also the middle of Muharram. Every night processions of black clothed Shiite figures marched through the streets, pounding drums, swinging chains, beating their backs in mourning for Faisal’s ancestor, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein.
The King unlocked his heart to Gertrude. Like a wounded bird, he appealed to her nurturing soul. She had urged him to bring his wife and children from the Hejaz to Iraq, but he was nervous, he said, “so uncertain of the future.” He had not yet won the loyalty of the people, he confessed; large portions of the country seemed to be wavering back toward the Turks and their reformist leader, Kemal Atatürk. Lighting another cigarette, he went on. He was eager to sign a treaty with Britain granting protection to Iraq, but he had no idea what terms the British would insist on or whether he could accept them. On the other hand, pressure was growing from extremist nationalists to break the status of mandate. “The truth is,” Gertrude had told her father a few days earlier, “there is very little real patriotism in this country and won’t be until people see that the Arab Govt, with us behind it, isn’t going to come to grief. Meantime there is a considerable population of asses who conceive that they’ll either manage the show or overturn it. They can do neither.”
But for now, she reassured the King, there was no reason to be anxious. We might be thankful for Your Majesty’s winning personality, and why, she added coyly, doesn’t Your Majesty use it more?
Yes, he replied eagerly, he wanted to be more in touch—should he not have little dinner parties? he suggested. But whom should he ask?
She would draw him up skeleton lists of dinner parties, English and Arab, she promised. He mustn’t mind if they were boring, she warned. “The notables here mostly are boring, but the more you know them the better you like them.”
“Wallahi!” he burst out enthusiastically; “you’re the mistress of the house—ask whom you think best.”
“It looks as though I shall run the Court till it gets on its feet,” she remarked the following morning as she arranged for a series of dinners. She sent off invitations to be printed, instructed the staff on how to fill in the lines and showed them how to address the envelopes.
On October 2, a dozen guests, half of them Arab, half of them British, arrived at the palace for Faisal’s first official dinner. Under Gertrude’s watchful eye, servants poured champagne into the proper glasses, and the aides-de-camp moved people around so that everyone had a chance to talk to the King. She declared the evening a great success and Faisal a charming host, but it had taken enormous preparation and more than a bit of coaching to pull it off.
As comfortably as she fit into the shoes of mistress of the Arab palace, Gertrude herself was struck by the oddness of it all. It was as though she had been transformed from a girl in a Yorkshire garden to a princess in the East. She compared her background to Faisal’s and to that of her landowning friend Faiq Bey: “I sometimes think how curious it all is, whether it’s Faiq Bey or King Faisal. People whose upbringing and assocations and traditions are all so entirely different, yet when one is with them one doesn’t notice the difference, nor do they. Think of Faisal, brought up at Mecca in a palace full of eunuchs, educated at Constantinople, Commander-in-Chief, King, exile, then King again; or Faiq, tending his palms and vines, and jogging into Baghdad to seek out the best market for his dates—and both of them run out to greet me with outstretched hands and then sit down to tell me in their several fashions what they make of life, as if I were a sister. And I feel like a sister, that’s the oddest part.”
Sister, daughter or lover, associate or friend, it was to men that she swore her allegiance. She “was always the slave of some momentary power,” T. E. Lawrence later wrote with hubris; “at one time Hogarth, at another Wilson, at another me, at last Sir Percy Cox.” It was men who appreciated her political skills, respected her keen intellect and admired her commanding personality, and she, in turn, appreciated, respected and admired them. And if her sharp tongue and impatience intimidated some of her colleagues, so be it. But with rare exceptions, she had little regard for their wives, and they felt the same about her. The women’s superficial interests, she believed, were equalled only by their deep suspicion of anything strange. Her one good friend, Aurelia Tod, who was Italian, had moved away, and the only other person she felt close to was Haji Naji. The kindly Shiite who sent her baskets of fruits and flowers was “an odd substitute for a female friend, but the best I can find,” she confessed. “That’s partly why I talk so much in my letters!”
At a fancy dinner with Arab magnates, given at the British Military School, Gertrude chatted with her friends Haji Naji, Nuri Said and Jafar Pasha, but out of the corner of her eye she inspected the women up and down. Lady Cox was a “model of discretion,” she observed, but Mrs. Slater’s brilliant green-and-gold gown, cut sleeveless and “outrageously low,” sent Gertrude rushing off to curse privately in Sir Percy’s ear. “I do wish that our women would show some suitability in their attire,” she sniffed. The venerable Arabs’ conception of female dress “is that it should leave no female visible,” she wrote home. “I hope that Sir Percy will send out a sumptuary order … but not in my report—I don’t want to antagonize the whole feminine world, with which I stand badly enough already, damn women!”
Like a chef in a Middle East kitchen, she stirred up a pungent stew, pouring in a mélange of spicy intrigues and, every so often, taking a spoonful of tantalizing power. In her own home, Arab politicians, British officials, and visiting writers like John Dos Passos of the New York Tribune, came regularly to dine. She still had her Tuesday teas for the Arab women, and with great sympathy for some, she still paid calls on the harems. After visiting the home of Daud Bey, “a worthless vicious man who spends all his money on dancing girls,” she came away in a fury. A popular figure among the British officers (due to his skill at polo), Daud was a far less popular man in his own home. Although by Muhammadan law the women in his family had a right to a share of his property, he refused to give either his mother or his nine beautiful sisters any money to spend. After hearing the women’s story, Gertrude summoned Daud. He cringed and bristled as she told him what she thought of him, but to her satisfaction, he eventually caved in. “Muslim women who never go out of the house and see no one are absolutely helpless in the face of their menfolk,” she chafed, “and there’s such a feeling against interfering in a man’s domestic affairs that no one does anything to help. I am in the strong position of being a woman so that I can go and see the women and take their part. But how I do hate Islam!”
Not all her visits to Arab women were gloomy. She enjoyed showing them how to dress in the European style, and once in a while she took it upon herself to teach a child, such as the daughter of Musa Chalabi, to read English, or to train some youngsters to sing. Gathering them together in a quivering chorus, she pounded out the melody on an old piano. “Open those mouths! Exaggerate the sounds! Louder! Louder!” she ordered. And standing like shaking leaves, the Arab children sang out “God Save The King.”
Gunshots in the north soon shattered the autumn air. Promises had been made to the Kurds that a republic would be established after the war, but with no formal treaty yet signed between Britain and Turkey, Kurdish activists were inciting their tribes to rebel. The Sunni Kurds made up one fifth of the Iraqi population, and if the new state of Iraq was to succeed, Gertrude believed it had to include the oil-rich region of Mosul and the grain-growing areas of Tikrit and Kirkuk. Nor could an independent Kurdistan survive; economically, the Kurds could not afford to exist alone and the British could not afford to defend them. “We haven’t a penny to spend in furthering Kurdish independence,” she insisted, “for if we encourage them we shall only have to abandon them in the hour of need, which would be the worst thing possible.”
In October 1921, after Faisal made a tour of the Mosul area, he came back to Baghdad convinced that he had won the loyalty of the Kurds. “On both sides a feeling of personal confidence has been established,” Gertrude wrote to her father. “That’s exactly what one wants to see, the establishment of mutual confidence between the King and his subjects.”
But an international conference was soon to be held in Lausanne to settle the issue of Mosul, and once again the natives started skirmishing. Pro-Turkish Kurds were trying to reclaim the territory for Turkey before the meeting took place. As an ethnic (non-Arab) group, the Kurds felt more allied to Persia and Turkey, with their large Kurdish populations, than to Iraq and its Arabs. Yet as Sunni Muslims, they were essential to Faisal’s kingdom, helping to balance the scale with the Shiites.
Smelling trouble, on November 3 Gertrude took the train north. “Kirkuk,” she said, “has refused rudely to swear allegiance to Faisal.” Half its population was Kurdish and the other half Turkish and, the latter wanted to restore their ties to Turkey. But, she noted, “since Kirkuk is in the middle of Iraq, [it] can’t be countenanced.” She would brook no nonsense, and urging Sir Percy to send a message to the instigators, she advised: “We must regretfully inform them that if they come they’ll have the warmest welcome they ever met with. The guns they’ve heard; the Levies are ready and behind them aeroplanes enough to obscure the light of the sun.”
Adding to the instability in Iraq was the dispute over the southern border. After years of menacing raids, Ibn Saud had finally struck and captured Hayil, the home of Ibn Rashid. Angry Shammar tribesmen stuffed their camel bags with revenge as they fled north, seeking refuge with the Anazeh. Border raids blazed the sand as Ibn Saud threatened not only Faisal in Iraq, but his brother Abdullah in TransJordan and his father, Sharif Hussein, in Mecca. “The underlying bitterness between him and the Sharifian family baffles description,” Gertrude observed.
Sir Percy Cox wanted a conference to clarify which tribes and lands belonged to Ibn Saud in Arabia and which to Faisal in Iraq. The frontier still needed to be clearly defined, and Gertrude spent time poring over a map, plotting the water wells claimed by the Shammar and those claimed by the Anazeh, drawing the boundary lines with Arabia. Seated beside her in the office were an Arab from Hayil and her favorite chieftain, Fahad Bey: “The latter’s belief in my knowledge of the desert makes me blush,” she chirped. “When he was asked by Mr. Cornwallis to define his tribal boundaries all he said was: ‘You ask the Khatun. She knows.’ ”
She stood at the pinnacle of her power. Yet as she peered out at the lofty vista, she could feel the earth beneath her beginning to slide. “I think I have been of some use here but I suspect I’ve come very near the end of it,” she confided to Hugh. “I often wonder whether I am right to stay here.” For the moment, however, she faced an enormous amount of work. A treaty of alliance between Britain and Iraq remained to be signed, but the issue of the mandate smeared the paper.
The British tied the treaty to the mandate they had received from the League of Nations; the Arabs saw the treaty as a means of breaking the humiliating mandate. Winston Churchill, then the Colonial Secretary, intended to hold on to British influence as long as possible, and the treaty was a subterfuge for keeping control. The pact would give the British almost complete authority over the financial and foreign affairs of the infant Iraqi state. But to the Arabs, the treaty represented a way of breaking loose, of gaining their honor, of restoring their pride, of establishing their independence. As King, Faisal intended to make Iraq an equal of England. If and when a treaty was signed, he wanted it to supersede the mandate.
Encouraged to seek independence by the United States, which had never recognized the mandate and wanted, in part, to reap its own financial rewards from the Arabs, the Iraqis would put up a strong fight against the mandate. “Oil is the trouble of course—detestable stuff,” Gertrude complained.
The path was hardly smooth, she wrote to a friend: “You know well enough that to travel along any oriental road at present is a breathless adventure. The worst stumbling blocks are however of our making—broken promises, impossible and therefore unratified treaties, mandates. It’s the last which touches us most here.
“From the very beginning,” she explained, “the King told us with complete frankness that he would fight the mandate to the death. His reason is obvious. He wants to prove to the world of Islam which is bitterly anti-British that in accepting the British help he has not sacrificed the independence of an Arab state—that he has gained that which he has already told the world he could gain through free and equal alliance with us.”
A thorn in everyone’s side, the mandate nettled the feelings of Iraqis and British alike, causing the entire relationship to come into question. As confidante of the King and close adviser to Cox, the Khatun was entrusted with the secrets of both. But when her love for Iraq clashed with her pride in the Empire, she remained on the side of her motherland, England. Despite her objections to the mandate, she recognized the need for British officials to toe the line. “We had no alternative,” she acknowledged. “We have told the King that under our instructions we must point out to him that he has only two courses. One is to reject the treaty with its underlying mandate, in which case we go; the other is to accept it and with it our help.”
Whatever rumblings shook the ground between Iraq and Britain, for now the bond between Gertrude and Faisal remained strong. “I can’t tell you how delightful our relations are,” she wrote glowingly, “an affectionate confidence which I don’t think could well be shaken. He usually addresses me with ‘Oh my sister’ which makes me feel like someone in the Arabian Nights. He is of course an exceptional beguiler—everyone falls under the charm—and his extremely subtle and quick intelligence is backed by a real nobility of purpose of which I’m always conscious.”
Chatting one afternoon with the King, Gertrude let drop that she planned to go home the next summer. “You’re not to talk of going home,” Faisal replied severely; “your home is here. You may say you are going to see your father.” Despite his sharp tone, his words pleased her; her fear of not being needed seemed premature. And adding color to her blush was the budding of a new romance.