CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
For several more months in 1922 Iraq floundered in a sea of crises: Cabinet Ministers resigned almost as soon as their names were announced, and Faisal seemed to float along, oblivious of the danger of a teetering government, treading against the Naqib, swimming against the advice of the pro-British Nuri Said and nearly drowning in the clutch of the extremists. As fond as she was of the King, Gertrude felt that he might destroy both himself and the British with his fatal flaw. “The King is rather a beloved himself,” she wrote. “Weak as water, he is full of the finest instincts. He reacts at once to everything that is noble and generous; he is naturally fine and discriminating; but he has the fatal defects of the Oriental—lack of moral courage and lack of intellectual poise; the latter, I suppose, a necessary corollary of ignorance … his indecision and cowardice may after all defeat us.”
In spite of the dizzying pace of protests by the extremists and more waffling by Faisal, first to the side of the nationalists, then to the side of the British, the month of July ended on a satisfying note. Dining en famille with Faisal on her fifty-fourth birthday, Gertrude won the King’s support for a law she had written to protect the country’s archaeological excavations. Even better, Faisal agreed—with Cox’s approval—to make her provisional Director of Antiquities.
Two weeks later, on Sunday the thirtieth, after receiving Arab guests at home, Gertrude set off for the weekly swimming party with Ken Cornwallis and their British colleagues Captain Clayton and the Nigel Davidsons (he, the new Judicial Adviser). This time, they were joined by Faisal. “The King was immensely pleased with himself,” Gertrude noted. He had just bought a bathing costume, but she added with a scoff, “he’s not much of a swimmer.”
With fig trees for her dressing room, she stepped out of her jersey swimsuit to change into dry clothes, and munching a ripe green fig, she toweled her hair. Over a bonfire of palm fronds, the King’s servants had roasted ten huge fish, surrounding them with an array of Syrian dishes. As the guests lay like the ancient Greeks on cushions plumped up on carpets that covered the grass, they ate by moonlight and chatted under the tamarisk trees. Faisal talked to Gertrude about his family, still living in Mecca, confiding his worries over whom his daughters would marry and how his son would be educated.
“It didn’t seem at all fantastic in that setting of crescent moon and quiet river,” she mused later, “but when I come to think of it, it is curious to be settling the family affairs of a descendant of the Prophet who is also King of Iraq.” But her concern over losing influence still lingered. “I hope he’ll go on being as devoted to me as he is now,” she wrote nervously, “for it does make things easier to deal with. Mr. Cornwallis also—it’s we two who ultimately guide him, and with him the destinies of the Arab world, if I’m not mistaken.”
On the first anniversary of Faisal’s accession to the throne, in August 1922, the country remained deeply divided over the treaty. Gertrude believed the majority of the people still wanted the King to sign it. If Faisal rejected the pact, Gertrude felt they would push him to abdicate the throne. But she was equally convinced that even if he did accept the treaty, ultimately the British would be forced to evacuate. Either way, the British were doomed. The Cabinet had resigned in protest against the King’s support for the Shiite extremists. Ten days later Gertrude remarked, “The Humpty Dumpty Cabinet is not up again yet, nor are the King’s horses and the King’s men going the right way to do it.” The unending conflict permeated her thoughts.
On August 23, the day of the anniversary celebration, Gertrude set off, wearing her lace dress and parasol; meeting up with the uniformed Percy Cox, she motored with him in a procession to the palace. Several hundred people had already crammed into the royal courtyard, and as the two British officials plunged through the mob, a voice shouted something they could not quite hear. The crowd applauded, and although neither Sir Percy nor Gertrude could understand what was said, the air seemed to ripple with anger. Inside the palace, their audience with Faisal went smoothly; yet to add to their suspicion, the King was noticeably nervous. Later in the day, after querying her informers, Gertrude learned the mob had been part of a popular protest; the demonstration had been sanctioned by the King. “Down with the mandate!” was the cry that had been shouted in the courtyard. It was a slap in the face of the British Empire. Cox dashed off an angry letter, but a public confrontation was avoided; once again, appendicitis felled the King.
Faisal lay in bed, feverish and in pain, waiting for the doctors to perform an emergency operation. With the physician’s permission, Percy Cox and Kinahan Cornwallis marched past the servants who guarded the door and entered the room where a crowd of slaves, armed and suspicious, hovered as they talked. The political position had grown so grave, the two men reproached the King, that repressive measures against the extremists were essential. Faisal must dissociate himself from the radicals and align himself squarely with the British camp. Begging him to agree, they asked permission to carry out the proper measures.
Faisal refused. If he did, he said, wincing in pain, the public would revolt. He knew how ill he was; he did not want to die with rebellion on his conscience. With that, the doctors took him away for the operation. It was none too soon. The appendix had abscessed; the King had been at the edge of death.
The extremists’ stirrings had reached a danger point, bubbling too close to the sort of rebellion that had occurred in 1920. Sir Percy took no chances. With the King sick and ineffectual, the High Commissioner ordered the police to arrest the seven principal agitators, while he shut down the radical newspapers and outlawed their political parties. That evening he issued a communiqué: with no existing Cabinet, and the King severely ill, the High Commissioner was taking control of the government.
“It is Sir Percy at his best and you can’t beat him,” Gertrude cheered, noting that the effect was instantaneous. “Since the King couldn’t summon up courage to come out into the open, his illness was beyond words fortunate. But Providence deserves comparatively little of the credit. Sir Percy has never made a mistake, either in resolution or in formulating his resolution.”
The following week, when a visiting Arab writer came to her office and told her he had been to see the King, Gertrude unleashed her anger. Railing at Ameen Rihani, she spoke of the bitter mood between herself and Faisal. “I have worked very hard for King Faisal,” she fumed, puffing furiously through her cigarette holder. “The tribes were against him, the chiefs would not vote for him. I argued with them. I persuaded them. I convinced them. I got them to vote for Faisal.”
She rose from the white sofa and marched across the room, opening the casement windows to let in a breeze from the Tigris. Then, flopping down again on the couch, the Khatun continued. “Yes, indeed,” she said. “I exerted every effort on his behalf. People said, ‘This man is a Hejazi, a foreigner.’ But I guaranteed him. I replied, ‘Ana’l kafil,’ I am the sponsor. Believe me, Ameen Effendi,” she implored, flattering her visitor by using the title Effendi, “I love Iraq almost as much as I love my own country. I’m an Iraqi, and I want to see the people of Iraq achieve their freedom and independence while helping us to promote at the same time the country’s progress.”
At a palace dinner a few nights later to welcome Faisal’s brother Prince Zaid, who had just arrived from the Hejaz, the King tried to explain his own behavior. “Remember,” he pleaded to Gertrude, “we have been slaves for six hundred years. The slave must protect himself by cunning. He is obliged to keep a foot in both camps—hatta ana: even I do it. We have not had centuries of liberty to train us to be free men.”
When, at last, a promise came from Winston Churchill that he would do all he could to have Iraq admitted to the League of Nations, Faisal was joyous. He had received almost everything he had held out for. Admission to the League would mean the end of the mandate and recognition of Iraq as a sovereign state. On October 8, 1922, the treaty was finally signed. Now all that was needed was ratification by the national assembly.
Early the same morning Gertrude joined the King and Cornwallis for a breakfast outing near Baquba. After picnicking at a long table under the fruit trees in Fakhri Bey’s garden, she and Ken slipped off together to walk among the orchards, fertile grounds filled with vineyards and groves of oranges and dates. They watched the peasants gathering pomegranates, and they lay together on the river bank looking up at the poplar leaves against the sky. “As far as I was concerned, Fakhri’s garden might well have been the gardens of paradise,” she wrote later. They lunched with the King, nineteen regal courses, and in the afternoon she and Ken broke off from the others, just the two of them motoring home across the desert, putting up coveys of grouse and shooting them, laughing together when twice their tires were punctured. They returned to Baghdad just after sunset, “drunk with sun and air.” It was years since she had described a day with a man so joyously. The languid pleasure of a picnic and the exuberant ride through the desert harked back to her youthful days with Henry Cadogan.
With more time now for socializing, she filled her calendar with dates with Ken Cornwallis and the King. Dinners and bridge games with Faisal (which he was always allowed to win), teas and tennis matches at the palace, races on Saturdays, rides through the palm gardens and, on Sundays, after a swim, intimate dinners at home with Ken.
There were her obligations as head of the Salam Library (she was, she noted, the only European ever elected); social calls on the Arab women, teaching them how to dress in fashionable French clothes; establishing an Iraqi branch of the Red Cross; and always more teas. Sati el Husari, chief aide to the Minister of Education, arrived with his wife and niece, and Gertrude welcomed them to her drawing room. Plopping a box of chocolates and some fashion magazines in front of her female guests, she quickly turned to talk to Sati. But after a while, his Turkish wife looked at her with disgust, and, to Gertrude’s surprise, in fluent English announced, “The next time you want to talk to my husband, you don’t need to invite me.” With that, Gertrude apologized and turned more hospitable.
Aside from her duties as the newly appointed honorary Director of Antiquities, her political workload declined. After a series of attacks by Kurdish rebels in the north, however, and counterattacks by the British air force, she set off to inspect the region. London was eager to solve the problem by creating a separate area of Kurdistan, but besides the fact that there was no defensible border between the two areas, “from the King downwards,” she observed before she left, “we all know, as they know at home also, that the Arab state cannot exist without the northern province. Baghdad is too closely dependent on Mosul.”
After investigating the situation among the local Armenians, Christians and Kurds, and after meeting with almost every important sheikh, holy man and notable, she returned to Baghdad on November 16, 1922, convinced that if the area was kept out of Turkish hands, the Kurds would become loyal citizens of Iraq.
The situation in Mosul was also of concern to Cox, but his long delayed border conference with Ibn Saud was about to take place, and by the time Gertrude came back to Baghdad, the High Commissioner was preparing to leave. She yearned to join him, but Ibn Saud had shown no fondness for her—too strong a woman for the chauvinist male—and for years Cox himself had nurtured the Arabian Sultan. Instead, it was Major Dickson and Major More, Sabih Bey, the Minister of the Interior, and Fahad Bey of the Anazeh who packed their dinner jackets and accompanied Cox as he set off on November 19 to sign a treaty.
Sir Percy had known Ibn Saud since the British official began his duties in the Gulf, and for eighteen years he had remained father figure, friend and financier to the Wahhabi leader. As Cox sailed toward Ojair, near Bahrain, Ibn Saud’s slaves prepared for his arrival. Lavish white tents of various sizes were pitched in the sand for sleeping, bathing, dining and entertaining; thick carpets were laid, luxurious furnishings installed and ample supplies of fresh fruits, Perrier water, Cuban cigars and Johnny Walker Scotch were stocked for Kokus.
The negotiations over the boundary lines went on for five days and nights while Cox, dressed in his suit, bow tie and felt fedora, served as a mediator between the robed representatives of Iraq, Kuwait and Arabia. Ibn Saud demanded that the borders be based on tribes, not territory, and according to his scheme, two groups—Fahad Bey’s Anazeh and part of the Shammar—would belong to Arabia, regardless of how far north they traveled. The two tribes would become a movable border, expanding and contracting, adjusting as they searched for grazing grounds; the border would change according to their nomadic needs. “East is East and West is West,” Kipling had written, and the two were never farther apart. To Cox and the British, the notion of property revolved around territory, but for Ibn Saud and the Bedouin, the idea of property was tied to people.
No progress could possibly be made, and by the sixth day Sir Percy lost his temper. With only Major Dickson at the meeting, he berated Ibn Saud as if he were a schoolboy. At the rate that both sides were going, he told the perfumed Arabian ruler, nothing would be settled for a year. Ibn Saud was on the verge of tears; Sir Percy Cox was his father and mother, he cried, the one who had made him and raised him from nothing to the position he held. He would surrender “half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered.”
With that, Sir Percy took hold of the map. Carefully drawing a red line across the face of it, he assigned a chunk of the Nejd to Iraq; then, to placate Ibn Saud, he took almost two thirds of the territory of Kuwait and gave it to Arabia. Last, drawing two zones, and declaring that they should be neutral, he called one the Kuwait Neutral Zone and the other the Iraq Neutral Zone. When a representative of Ibn Saud pressed Cox not to make a Kuwait Neutral Zone, Sir Percy asked him why. “Quite candidly,” the man answered, “because we think oil exists there.” “That,” replied the High Commissioner, “is exactly why I have made it a neutral zone. Each side shall have a half-share.” The agreement, signed by all three sides at the beginning of December 1922, confirmed the boundary lines drawn so carefully by Gertrude Bell. But for seventy years, up until and including the 1990 Gulf War involving Iraq and Kuwait, the dispute over the borders would continue.
“Do you know,” Gertrude wrote to Hugh toward the end of 1922, “a propos of nothing at all—that I’ve been four times mentioned in dispatches for my valuable and distinguished services in the files! It came to me as a surprise—indeed it is singularly preposterous—when I counted up the documents in order to fill up a Colonial Office Form. I hadn’t realised there were so many.” At a recent Arab ladies’ tea party she had asked, “Who is the smartest lady in Baghdad?” “You, of course,” the women replied, and her face beamed with pleasure. But as much recognition as she still received, Gertrude felt that her importance had already begun to diminish. By mid-December she had finished her yearly report for the Secretary of State, observing ruefully, “I seem to have done singularly little of interest.” Her power lay in the strength of the British presence, and as the Arab Government took hold, her influence slipped even further. Although her friendship with the King continued, he no longer needed her as his liaison to the High Commissioner. Her role was changing from political counselor to personal companion.
A Christmas trip along the Euphrates with Ken Cornwallis and two other British officers served as a pleasant holiday respite, and, returning at the end of the month, she was not unhappy to find a pile of reports to write for Cox. “The fact remains,” she stated, “that whatever I may do in the future, I shall never have a chief whom I serve more wholeheartedly than I serve him.” Sir Percy was due to retire within a few months, but in preparation for that, he was returning to England to help conclude the government’s peace with Turkey and its policy on Iraq. With the Turks threatening to invade, Cox was determined to see that Britain did not desert its friend. Britain had gone to Mesopotamia in 1914 to protect its oil fields, its trade and its interests in the Persian Gulf, Cox would remind the Cabinet committee, and if it withdrew from Iraq now, it might lose all that it had set out to preserve. “There is, remember, no defensible frontier between Mosul and Baghdad, and if the Turks take Baghdad will they not aim at taking Basrah too?” he would ask. “A bad peace will be more costly than our present responsiblities since it will compel us to take special military measures in our own defence.”
Before Cox left for England he appointed Henry Dobbs as his deputy, and in early January Gertrude gave a dinner at home to introduce Dobbs to her colleague Nigel Davidson, the Judiciary Adviser, and to her intimate friend Ken Cornwallis, the King’s Adviser. The conversation focused on the Kurdish dilemma, which would continue long after the British left the scene. The Turks had denied the Kurdish claims for independence, while Faisal had indicated he would favor an autonomous Kurdish government within the boundaries of Iraq as long as the Kurds were tied economically and politically to Iraq (a position taken years later by Saddam Hussein). Faisal’s words had served to quell the insurgents, but a few weeks later Dobbs, concerned about new attacks, sent troops to the northern border to discourage Turkish aggression, and the King sent his younger brother Zaid to set up a royal household in Mosul, hoping to win the Kurds to the Iraqi side. In the meantime, an international conference, convening in Lausanne, would take up the Kurdish claim to independence.
There was little that Gertrude could do about Mosul, and she turned her attention to archaeology. A group from Chicago’s Field Museum had come to work at Kish, and a joint team had arrived from the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to excavate at Ur. As Honorary Director of Archaeology, Gertrude took great interest in inspecting the sites. The ancient Sumerian city of Ur, biblical birthplace of Abraham, had flourished nearly six thousand years earlier, and its mound would yield archaeological riches for years of digging to come. The excavation would produce every aspect of Sumerian life, from the ziggurats—the staggered staircased towers of 2000 B.C.—to the thin, curved canoes still being made to cross the marshes, to the most spectacular treasures in the Royal Tombs: golden statuettes, golden headdresses, golden daggers hilted in lapis lazuli, copper vases and cuneiform tablets. Seeing the excavation even in its early stages, she said, was the most thrilling sensation she had ever experienced in archaeology. Most important, under the law of excavation drawn up by Gertrude Bell, Iraq would be protected from being robbed of its ancient wealth.
In Baghdad that early spring, she busied herself with furnishings for the King’s new palace and with receptions for Sir Percy Cox. He had pushed up his retirement to May, and although it was Ramadan, the month of April swirled with a rush of farewell parties. From Haji Naji to the King, from the Indian bazaar merchants to the Royal Air Force, everyone seemed eager to host an event for the High Commissioner. Finally, on May 1, 1923, the Coxes waved goodbye. It was a sad moment for Gertrude. “I’m rather overcome with departure,” she confessed with a heavy heart. “Sir Percy left, a very moving farewell.”
He had been the most significant figure in her life for nearly seven years; the Arabs thought the world of him and called him “foxy,” but to her he was so much more; he was wise, caring and calm, a father figure and a friend, the one person in the East she could count on in troubled times. He understood her point of view, appreciated her tireless efforts, admired her abilities. He had accepted her when she first arrived in Basrah in 1916; welcomed her to join his office in Baghdad despite the objections of General Maude; relied completely on her Intelligence work with the Arabs during and after the war; defended her against A. T. Wilson’s tirades; valued her knowledge of archaeology; and always, always treated her with respect. And she was devoted to him. “I think no Englishman has inspired more confidence in the East,” she said. No Englishman except her father inspired more confidence in her. Her mentor had gone, and as Gertrude prepared warily for her own vacation at home, she felt unsure of the welcome she would receive when she returned to Baghdad in the fall.