CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Aman of Olympian height, with an outsized nose and piercing blue eyes, Kinahan Cornwallis had the strong looks and keen mind that Gertrude found attractive. Like her, he had been at Oxford, making his mark in athletics as well as in academics, and like her, he had been attached to the Arab Bureau, serving first as liaison to the Sharif Hussein and his son Faisal, and then as chief of the Cairo Intelligence office. He spoke in a slow, gruff voice, exhibited a quiet manner and evidenced a leadership that inspired trust. He was “forged from one of those incredible metals with a melting point of thousands of degrees,” Lawrence described him; “he could remain for months hotter than other men’s white-heat, and yet look cold and hard.” For Gertrude, he was “a tower of strength and wisdom,” who bore the triumph of the Arabs over the Turks, of practicality over pipe dreams, of wisdom over whim. If she was the romantic breeze, he was the steady rock.
Personal Adviser to the King and Chief Adviser in the Ministry of the Interior, Kinahan Cornwallis was the only other British official besides Gertrude in whom Faisal had great confidence. The two had been placed side by side, supporting stakes behind the sapling King.
“He seems to me so wise and unacademic in his appreciation of the Arab point of view,” Gertrude wrote in describing Cornwallis to Hugh. “I hope it’s not because he and I see eye to eye that I rate his discernment so highly!” Thousands of miles from his wife and children, he had separated himself from his family, not just by geographic distance but by environment and emotion. As it had for Gertrude, Iraq had become the central place, the central point in his life. Peering together through the same camera lens, she and Cornwallis focused on a similar picture.
On an afternoon when she invited him to tea, Gertrude sought his advice. Should she stay on in Iraq? she asked him anxiously. Sir Percy would be retiring in a year; after that, what role did he think she would play? And would she have a role at all? she wondered. Cornwallis replied in a steady voice, his calm demeanor a rock for her to lean on. They were the only two people in the foreign service of Iraq who had no ulterior objective, he said. Nothing but real necessity ought to call her away. Cheered by his confidence, she put aside her fears and finished her tea.
A gloomy letter from England about her father’s declining fortune, and a bout of appendicitis suffered in Baghdad by Faisal, gave a damp start to the year of 1922, but the knowledge that her job was secure, at least until Sir Percy retired in 1923, and that she had the intimate confidence of Faisal and a growing friendship with Cornwallis, kept her spirits buoyed. By early spring her garden bloomed with daffodils, marigolds and wallflowers, her cook was serving up platters of ripened truffles and her wardrobe was replenished with new dresses and cloaks from home. And in February a parcel from England landed on her desk, and when she quickly tore it open, a diamond tiara rolled out. “I nearly laughed aloud,” she wrote to Florence, “it was such an unexpected object in the middle of the office files. But it’s too kind of you to let me have it. I’d forgotten how fine it was. I fear in wearing it I may be taken for the crowned Queen of Mesopotamia.”
To Hugh she wrote euphorically: “I want to tell you, just you, who know and understand everything, that I’m acutely conscious of how much life has given me. I’ve gone back now to the wild feeling of joy in existence—I’m happy in feeling that I’ve got the love and confidence of a whole nation, a very wonderful and absorbing thing—almost too absorbing perhaps. You must forgive me if it seems to preoccupy me too much—it doesn’t really divide me from you, for one of the greatest pleasures is to tell you all about it, in the certainty that you will sympathise. I don’t for a moment suppose that I can make much difference to our ultimate relations with the Arabs and with Asia, but for the time I’m one of the factors in the game.” She did not mention Cornwallis, but his affection underscored her joy.
Thinking back to the lost opportunities for marriage and children, she added pensively, “I remember your saying to me once that the older one grows the more one lives in other people’s lives. Well, I’ve got plenty of lives to live in, haven’t I? And perhaps, after all, it has been best this way. At any rate, as it had to be this way, I don’t now regret it.”
Neither the Cabinet’s dismissal by Faisal, who had lost his patience with all the Ministers, nor a suspicious meeting in Karbala of the sheikhs and holy men, could shake her spirits. Her father was coming out to Jerusalem, and on the morning of April 29, 1922, Gertrude drove to the Baghdad airstrip. Skirting the rules against female passengers—“I’m an officer and I’m sexless,”—she climbed aboard one of the two British air force mail planes flying to TransJordan. From there she had hoped to travel with Hugh to Damascus, but the situation had become too dangerous. Even the flight to Amman was risky, she explained. “It’s clear that any journey of mine in Syria would be classed in their Criminal Investigation reports under the heading of Movements of Suspects.… Anyway I expect Father and I will be happy even if he has to come and hold my hand while I’m sitting in gaol!” Ironically, it was near Amman that the Turkish authorities had tried to stop her in 1914 on her way to Arabia, the very trip that had led to her imprisonment in Hayil and to her Intelligence work in Iraq.
After three weeks of travel through TransJordan, Palestine and Lebanon, Gertrude took leave of her father and headed home. On the six-hour flight to Baghdad, while the plane, battered by a north wind, sped at one hundred miles an hour, Gertrude stared out the window, following tire tracks in the sand, keeping count of the landing sites so that she would know where they were. “I fear I’ve become the confirmed aviator,” she announced after the plane touched down.
Faisal welcomed her back with an invitation to tea. Telling him what he wanted to hear, she reported how poorly the French were doing in Syria: their officials spoke no Arabic, had no personal relationships with the Arabs, and patrolled the streets with soldiers, “in deadly fear of an uprising.” She was convinced that Iraq was “the only Arab province set in the right path.”
The King asked her advice on an ultimatum he had received from Churchill. The Arab Government must accept the fact that in order to have the treaty of independence, they would have to accept the mandate, Churchill said, even though it guaranteed British control. If Iraq refused to accept those conditions, the Colonial Secretary announced, the British would pull out by Christmas. There seemed little choice but to go along with Churchill’s demands.
A short while later the King admitted that he owed his throne to the British and needed their protection; if they withdrew from Iraq, his Arab opponents would overthrow him. What’s more, the country would be eaten alive, the carcass torn apart by townsmen, tribesmen, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Turks all fighting for a piece of the territory.
Almost as soon as Faisal declared his consent, he changed his mind. Under pressure from the nationalists, he announced his willingness to sign the treaty, but only if it had equal status with, and was not subordinate to, the mandate. Iraq should be seen as an equal partner with Britain, he insisted, and he called for total abrogation of the mandate. But Churchill gave a brusque reply: Britain could conclude a treaty only with a mandate; that was the status given Iraq by the League of Nations under international law.
When a group of extremists held a demonstration against the British, Faisal refused to stop them, even showing support for the most radical of the nationalists. The Khatun had learned that, among his advisers, some had been trying to persuade him to declare himself an independent Islamic king; if he did, they assured him, the whole country would fall in line. Now he was succumbing to their advice. “The country will rally round him,” Gertrude had written Hugh, “but not because of a sudden and miraculous change of heart. What is needed is several years of stability and decent government, not a miracle but a reward earned by steady work.”
For more than a year she had struggled to make Faisal king, and now he was not merely destroying her work; he was destroying the special bond between England and Iraq. It was only with British support that Faisal could stay on the throne, and it was only through Faisal that the British could maintain their influence. Turning to Mr. Cornwallis, “her great standby,” as she called him, she discovered that, like her, he too was “feeling bitterly disillusioned.”
Distraught over Faisal’s bias toward the extremists, she decided to tell him exactly how she felt. When an invitation came for tea on June 4, 1922, she put on her dress and hat and steeled herself for a confrontation. Waves of heat rose off the ground as she made her way to the palace, and on the streets, sweat poured off the brows of men and animals. In the whitewashed reception room of the King’s house, the electric ceiling fans whirred with agitation. Faisal appeared, dramatic with his dark eyes and white robes, and when he welcomed her, she curtsied, but as she lowered her body, her eyes glowered angrily. Beneath the gracious formalities, she knew that Faisal knew how enraged she was. “I am playing my last card,” she told him flatly. Did he believe in her personal sincerity and devotion to him? she asked.
He could not doubt it, he answered, because he knew what she had done for him during the past year.
In that case, Gertrude announced, she could speak with perfect freedom. “I am extremely unhappy,” she said. “I had formed a beautiful and gracious snow image to which I had given allegiance and I saw it melting before my eyes. Before every noble outline has been obliterated, I prefer to go; in spite of my love for the Arab nation and my sense of responsibility for its future, I do not think I could bear to see the evaporation of the dream which has guided me day by day.”
She had believed the King to be moved only by the highest principles, she asserted, but she saw him now as victim of every malcontent and every form of malicious rumor. He listened to men who, during the war, had betrayed the Arabs who served the British, giving their names to the Turks, and tomorrow, when the British left and the Turks returned, these same men would turn around and betray the Arabs who served under Faisal. The King responded by taking her hand and kissing it.
When they had taken their tea, the King explained his position. It was his task to reassure the extremists, he said; better to rein them in than to let them run wild. But, he reminded her, the British had consistently refused to recognize them. That made his task far more difficult.
She replied calmly that there was no reason why a modus vivendi could not be found; if only the King would lend his support to the mandate, they could live together in harmony. He would, Faisal finally said; he promised to try.
Pleased by what had transpired, Gertrude rose to leave, and taking Faisal’s hand, she tried respectfully to kiss it. But the King demurred. Instead, with great affection, he embraced her.
“I’m still sous le coup of this interview,” she wrote when she arrived at her house. “Faisal is one of the most lovable of human beings but he is amazingly lacking in strength of character. With the highest ideals, he will trip any moment over the meanest obstacle—he has hitched his wagon to the stars, but with such a long rope that it gets entangled in every thicket. You can’t do anything with him except by immense personal sympathy—it isn’t difficult to give it to him, but one must remember that he veers with every breath. I’ve left him tonight convinced that my one desire is to serve him; tomorrow he will be full of doubts. But at the bottom of his mind, with many deviations from the course, he trusts us and believes that one or two of us—Mr. Cornwallis and I and Captain Clayton for instance—would go to the stake for him and that’s the strongest hold we have with him.”
Two days later Faisal had veered back toward the extremists. “Oh the King, the King,” she wailed. “If only he would be more firm. He is missing the opportunity of a lifetime—but what can one do?”
A fortnight later, when another invitation arrived from the King, Gertrude grabbed the new parasol sent by her sister Elsa and, making her way to the palace, mulled over what she would say. Her worries were needless: it turned out to be “the most interesting talk” they had ever had.
Faisal’s reluctance to accept the mandate stemmed from his sense of betrayal in Syria. The British had made great promises to him during the war: Damascus, the seat of early Muslim empires, of the Omayyads and the Mameluks, would be his to rule. Visions of Greater Syria danced before his eyes, a land that once stretched from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to the Euphrates in Iraq, from Alexandria to Arabia, and included Jerusalem and TransJordan. But the British had let him down.
As Faisal described the whole background of his current feelings, Gertrude hung on his every word. With sadness in his eyes, he discussed the events of the Paris Peace Conference and his gradual understanding that even though England had made him promises, it would abandon him to France. He spoke of his determination to establish an Arab Government in Syria and how he was finally forced out by nationalist extremists on his own side as well as by the French.
“In my opinion,” Gertrude responded, “there were scarcely words strong enough to express my sense of our responsibility for the Syrian disaster.”
“You must remember,” Faisal cautioned, his sorrowful eyes reflecting his disappointment, “that I stood, and I stand, entirely alone. I have never had the support of my father or my brother Abdullah. They were both bitterly jealous of the position which the successful issue of the Arab campaign had given me in Syria. When I was summoned to Europe after the Armistice, I was so conscious of their feelings towards me that I begged my father to send my brother Abdullah to Paris instead of myself. He refused but it was not because I had the confidence of my family. I have never had it.”
He reminded her of the Arab conference in March 1920, when he was proclaimed King of Syria. “Do you realize why I encouraged the handful of Iraqis in Syria to nominate my brother Abdullah, King of the Iraq?” he asked. “I knew that the whole business was laughable, but I gave it my countenance in order to appease my own brother. He is as you know older than I am—I wanted to give him a status in the Arab world in order to disarm his hostility. He and my father never cared to accuse me of working solely in my own personal interest. What did it matter to me whether I or another was King of Syria? My task was to obliterate family dissensions and therefore I encouraged the nomination of my brother Abdullah to the Iraq. I knew that it was absurd.”
But it was time to move on, he acknowledged. “I must form a new Arab ideal. Where shall I begin?”
“You must begin with Iraq,” Gertrude answered.
She could not but feel sympathy for the man. Later she noted, “We betrayed him and he has not only forgiven the betrayal but has continued to trust us. It is a great deal more than we deserve.”
Before Gertrude left the palace that afternoon, Faisal confided that he would never forget the gracious image she had drawn of snow; he did not want it to melt. If the British government gave him a treaty to which he could honorably (and that was the key) set his name, he would go ahead along the lines she suggested.
At the party in her garden that night, Gertrude moved happily among her guests, glittering as the lanterns she had strung through the trees. The draft of the treaty had arrived from London, and as servants passed coffee and ices, her Arab and English guests savored the terms. But the following day, when the document was presented before the Cabinet, the Ministers refused to approve it; it was all that she and Cornwallis could do to persuade them to continue the debate.
The summer air was thick as a hornet’s nest with controversy, the very word mandate stinging the Iraqi public. Once again the Shiite holy men called for an uprising against the British, and two Euphrates sheikhs who favored the mandate were murdered. In Baghdad large groups of notables visited the Naqib, warning him of shocking disasters if the treaty were accepted.
While the Cabinet Ministers argued heatedly over what to do, the King came out clearly against the mandate. Even the British offer to help Iraq obtain a seat at the League of Nations once the treaty was signed did nothing to placate the Arabs’ anger. Rumors spread that a large demonstration was being organized, and the foul smell of insurrection grew stronger. The debate raged on and the King kept stalling, raising objections, until, after another week of hearing one exception after another, Cox disgustedly declared that no further alterations to the treaty would be allowed.
Through it all Gertrude consulted with Ken Cornwallis. The King had become their excuse for a flirtation, and they not only talked about the King, they swam together and picnicked on Sunday afternoons, laughed together over weekday lunches, confided over dinners and teas, shared stories, compared notes on Faisal’s temperament, and agreed that, as much as the King embraced Ken, it was Gertrude’s hand that he preferred.
But even Faisal’s charm had its limits. Gertrude was livid at his double-dealing. Assuring her again and again privately that he was in favor of the treaty, he then did everything publicly to undermine it. When she ran into Nuri Said, she told him how she felt. The attitude of the King was entirely indefensible, she scolded; she did not see how she could continue to confide in him. Early the next morning, on July 6, a message arrived inviting her to the palace for tea. She begged to be excused. But two hours later, after Ken Cornwallis phoned and urged her to go, Gertrude marched reluctantly into the palace.
The warm welcome from Faisal did little to calm the Khatun. She was in no mood to be disarmed. She had come against her better judgment, she announced, and for fifteen minutes they talked acrimoniously. She did not believe a word he said, she told him. But if she left him at that, she knew, she would never come back. “We had better find a modus vivendi,” she finally said.
The King nodded in agreement.
Gertrude presented the evidence that showed his duplicity: although he had said he was for the treaty, he had deliberately worked to defeat its passage. Faisal admitted he “had worked and would continue to work against the acceptance of the principle of the mandate.” The heated discussion went on. At last, after two hours, she rose to go. The King stood too, and taking her in his arms, he embraced her warmly. But it was a standoff: “We parted on rather unsatisfactory terms of close sentimental union and political divergence!”
Her only hope was that the British could persuade the King to go along with the treaty on the premise that, soon afterward, H.M.G. would abrogate the mandate. Surely, Churchill could give this assurance privately to Faisal. “The mandate is tosh,” she wrote home. “If we can’t do that, hell will be let loose in Iraq, Faisal will lose his second throne, and where do you think he will find a third? At the moment,” she confided, “I feel spiritually exhausted.”