Desert Queen (41 page)

A singular tour in Basrah had been organized in Ibn Saud’s honor; he was given a show of British technology that was meant to dazzle. Within a few hours he stood before a parade of British forces, saw high explosives fired from an improvised trench and watched as antiaircraft shells burst in the air. He was taken on a brand-new railway and was driven through the desert in a motor car; at a hospital housed in a palace on loan from the Sheikh of Muhammarah, he was shown his own long, slim hand under an X-ray machine, and a short while later he witnessed an airplane zooming into the sky. Gertrude, wearing a silk-brimmed hat, smart jacket and skirt, with a camera case slung over her shoulder, stayed close to his side and, speaking in her classical Arabic, an accent strange to his ear, demanded: “Abdul Aziz, look at this,” or “Abdul Aziz, what do you think of that?”

Amazing as the parade of British force might have been, it was not nearly as startling to him as Gertrude herself. He had never before met a European woman, and although he had been warned in advance, nothing had prepared him for the fact that this unveiled female was not only allowed in his sight but was accorded priorities and permitted to engage in all the procedures, whether they were discussions on Arabian politics or social functions in his honor. He looked down with heavily lidded eyes, dismayed at the Englishwoman who seemed to be everywhere.

She, in turn, found him “one of the most striking personalities” she had ever encountered, “full of wonder but never agape. He asked innumerable questions and made intelligent comments.… He’s a big man,” she observed, adding ironically, “I wish we could expound to him the science of peace, but we’ve got to get through this war first and hope that the better things will come after. Will they? It’s an open question whether we don’t do these people more harm than good and one feels still more despairing about it now that our civilisation has broken down so completely. But we can’t leave them alone, they won’t be left alone anyway, and whatever you may feel the world moves on—even in Arabia.”

“Politician, ruler and raider, Ibn Sa’ud illustrates a historic type,” Gertrude wrote in a communiqué for the Foreign Office and the
Arab Bulletin
. “Such men as he are the exception in any community, but they are thrown up persistently by the Arab race in its own sphere, and in that sphere they meet its needs.… The ultimate source of power, here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality of the commander. Through him, whether he be an Abbasid Khalif or an Amir of Nejd, the political entity holds, and with his disappearance it breaks.” The echo of her words would ring throughout the region for the rest of the century, in men like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.

Her detailed account of Ibn Saud and British relations with Arabia was finished the first week of December 1916 and sent off to the highest officials in England, Egypt and India. As important as her reporting was regarded, however, she felt restrained; a month before, T. E. Lawrence had left for his first adventure with the Sharif’s army in Arabia. But as a woman, Gertrude was confined primarily to her desk. With a heavy sense of frustration, she wrote: “One can’t do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it; one can get the things recorded in the right way and that means, I hope, that unconsciously people will judge events as you think they ought to be judged. But it’s small change for doing things, very small change I feel at times.”

“D
o you know,” Gertrude mused, as she sat in her room ten days before Christmas 1916, writing her weekly letter to her father, “I was thinking yesterday what I would pick out as the happiest things I’ve done in all my life, and I came to the conclusion that I should choose the old Italian journeys with you, those long ago journeys which were so delicious. I’ve been very unhappy in the big things and very happy in the little things … only in that very big thing, complete love and confidence in my own family—I’ve had that always and can’t lose it. And you are the pivot of it.”

Her father had always been the source of her strength. From earliest childhood she had received his undiluted, never-ending love, and it was from him that she gained the self-esteem and self-assurance to reach as far as she could. “The abiding influence” in her life, her stepmother wrote later, “was her relation to her father. Her devotion to him, her whole-hearted admiration, the close and satisfying companionship between them, their deep mutual affection—these were to both the very foundation of existence.”

Her father’s affection served as a potent elixir, flushing away her disappointments, reinforcing her vigor. In return for his confidence in her, she trusted in him completely: he was the final authority; and even when he had caused her pain by refusing to accept her engagement to Henry Cadogan, she reluctantly agreed to his decision. From her youngest days, she and her father were friends; there were times when she played the role of Hugh Bell’s child and times when she played his companion; and whatever role she played, he was always her guardian angel.

T
wenty years later, she found another companion in the charming St. John Philby. They shared a common aversion to A. T. Wilson, whom Philby found “domineering,” and enjoyed a common interest in charting the tribes and the genealogies of the sheikhs. But more than that, they became good friends. On December 21, 1916, Gertrude informed her family that she and St. John were going up the Tigris together. Philby had been asked by Cox to report on restless tribesmen up the river. Gertrude was reluctant to participate in the Christmas celebrations in Basrah, and thus felt relieved as they embarked together in Philby’s launch. It was her fourth Christmas in foreign parts: “Arabia, Boulogne, Cairo and Qalat Salih. The last is where I expect to be on Xmas Day and I’m truly thankful to escape any attempt at feasts here.” The celebration would only be a painful reminder of the husband and family she lacked.

On a warm and sunny day they steamed up the bending Tigris, sailing past villages of reed-built homes, pausing to look at the tomb where the Prophet Ezra was said to be buried, stopping finally at Qalat Salih, where their mutual friend Mr. Bullard had lent them his cottage. Gertrude and the handsome Philby talked for hours, and she described the stay enthusiastically: “We occupied his tiny house, sent for rations and prepared to lead a rough tin-fed life. But behold my boy developed a genius for cooking and we lived for 5 days on the fat of the land.”

Explorations through the marshes took them to a part of the country that she had never seen before: village after village built of reeds, and fields of rice irrigated by the canals along the Tigris. After a week of meeting the marsh Arabs and dining with local sheikhs, Philby returned to Headquarters to welcome his wife, just arrived from India. Gertrude remained in the marshes a few extra days, gathering information about tribes and families that had baffled her in Basrah. She returned home alone, welcomed only by her mail from England.

T
he new year of 1917 brought with it rain and mud and the danger of walking to work, but Gertrude’s life was made easier now by two servants and new living quarters—a two-room suite in the Political Office—allotted to her by Percy Cox. Her apartment contained a large sitting room and a dressing room screened off from the bed, “a blessing,” she wrote, since she had been “miserably uncomfortable,” lacking a place to work at night. Of course, there were still the small irritations: the tinned butter and tinned milk had grown so tasteless that she no longer even wanted them; the sheath of her pen had broken, requiring a new broad-nibbed fountain pen from England; her hair was still falling out; and a box of clothing sent from home by Thomas Cook & Sons had been waylaid in Bombay.

As soon as it was brought to her in Basrah, Gertrude hastily opened the carton. Eager to try on the black satin gown tucked inside, she sifted through the packing papers, but instead of running her hands over the rich, smooth fabric, all she could find was a small cardboard box and, in it, a black coat, a gold flower and some net. Nearly in tears, she wrote to Florence that the carton had been tampered with in India. “The gown has been abstracted. Isn’t it infuriating?” she cried. Ten days later it was still bothering her: “Isn’t it a tragedy about my black satin gown. Of course it’s just the very gown most wanted … (I feel as if I were playing the leading role in the
Emperor’s New Clothes
).” But even worse than the loss of her dress was the loss of her hair. “Presently I shall have to ask you to send me a nice wig. I haven’t got enough hair left to pin a hat to,” she moaned.

But these irksome matters were unimportant compared to the praise she had won for her work. “Happy to tell you that I hear my utterances receive a truly preposterous attention in London,” she proudly informed her parents on January 13, 1917. One week later she received a commendation from the India Office in which it was noted: “They lectured her on the Indian Official Secrets Act and actually censored her letters. For a woman of her status the position must have been uncommonly galling; but she put up with it and I imagine that the improvement in the political attitude of Basrah to Cairo and H.M.G. [His Majesty’s Government] is largely due to her work.”

Her opinions were now more in tandem with the India officials in Basrah than with her colleagues in Cairo. In a message to Hogarth, while showing support for the Arab Bureau’s policy, she indicated that she was a part of Sir Percy’s team. “I think we’ll still plump for the Sharif,” she wrote. “His affairs seem to be taking a satisfactory turn and if they do, it will mean a good deal.” But like Sir Percy Cox, she also supported Ibn Saud and wished he would join the Sharif in his revolt against the Turks. “He must be requested to do so, for now’s the time.” As for her nemesis, Ibn Rashid, whose ruthless family had once taken her prisoner in Hayil, reports were coming in that his brother-in-law, who served as his Vizier, was about to assassinate the truculent Emir.

Coincidentally, her work on Ibn Saud was to be published soon. “You’ll see a piece of mine in the papers about Ibn Saud,” she told her parents, adding somewhat cynically, “I gather the India Office are going to publish it. No, I don’t suppose you will, for they usually publish these things in papers which no one reads.”

By mid-February 1917 her writings on the tribes were also ready for publication, and she felt gratified as she read through the proofs. Of all her work it was, she told her father, the constant thread that gave her increasing satisfaction.
The Arab of Mesopotamia
would provide military and political officials with a complete and thorough background on the local tribes.

As the winter progressed, British troops under the successful command of General Maude finally took Kut and were edging closer to Baghdad. Gertrude’s work in Basrah was nearly done, and on March 2, 1917, one year after her arrival, she wrote home that she had been asked to do an outline of modern Arabian history for Intelligence, “(the sort of thing I really enjoy doing), so I’ve turned to that. The amount I’ve written during the last year is appalling.… It comes to a great volume of material, of one kind and another.… But it’s sometimes exasperating to be obliged to sit in an office when I long to be out in the desert, seeing the places I hear of, and finding out about them for myself.”