Desert Queen (48 page)

W
hitehall promised to “take no action if they can avoid it until Miss Bell arrives,” so she left Baghdad, heading not yet for England, but for France. There, at the Paris Peace Conference, the leaders of Europe were meeting to divide the spoils of the First World War and carve up the remains of three empires: Austro-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. At A. T. Wilson’s request, Gertrude would make sure that when the talk turned to Mesopotamia, British interests would be well represented. But that would prove more complex than the Acting Civil Commissioner had believed: Lawrence and Faisal, who had fought side by side in the desert battle against the Turks, were now fighting side by side in the political battle against the Allies. They were already in Paris, and Gertrude’s opinions would soon swerve away from Wilson and swing toward them.

T
he journey to Europe went via Egypt. Gertrude sailed on the
Ormonde
, and on the morning her boat docked at Port Said, she dressed with great anticipation. She slipped on her calf-length dress, topped her hair with a flowered hat and waited excitedly for David Hogarth. Her friend and former mentor, traveling from Cairo to see her, found her “more affectionate than ever,” looking “a little older,” he wrote to his wife, “but still wonderfully alive and well turned out.” They spent two hours together, clarifying some questions he had, discussing her mandate to Whitehall.

Gertrude reached Paris on the seventh of March 1919. The French capital was electric, glittering with power and charged with the current of international conspiracy. Each nation had come with its own agenda: the Italians to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the French to disarm the Germans, regain Alsace and Lorraine and the Saar region and gain their share of the Ottoman Empire (including control of Syria); the British to win the German colonies in Africa and the South Pacific, keep control of Mesopotamia, have protectorates in Persia and Egypt and see the end of German naval power; the Americans to establish their dream of a League of Nations. And, in addition, each one wanted control over oil. The highest officials of every country had arrived, blocking the streets with their hired cars, booking up tables at Fouquet’s and the Pré Catalan, chattering at the Paris Opéra and enlivening the hotel lobbies with the buzz of global schemes. “It was a gathering of the nations such as the world had never seen or dreamed of before,” wrote Domnul Chirol, who had come from London in January at the opening of the winter conference on behalf of the British Government to lobby the French press.

The inner circle of white-haired leaders was meeting every day at the Elsyeé Palace on the Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré. Armed with heavy leather pouches and giving off a whiff of violet hair wash, the Council of Ten, accompanied by military aides, interpreters and advisers, paraded along parquet floors through thick double doors to the plushly carpeted study of the French Foreign Minister. In M. Picot’s splendid paneled chamber, where the smell of typewriter ribbons and polished furniture mixed with the scent of secrecy, chandeliers blazed and draperies of red damask were drawn tight so that not a sound nor a signal escaped from the privileged room. A long baize table, covered with blotting papers, tracing tissue and maps, was lined with facing rows of great gilt armchairs, behind which two more rows of little gold seats were reserved for secretaries and advisers.

At the head of the vast stretch of green-covered table, with his back to a glowing fire of huge logs, sat the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, dressed like all the others in a black wool suit, starched white collar and crisp white cuffs. With his gray-gloved hands resting on the arms of his seat, he rose to address the group, and with his head thrown back and his shoulders hunched, he spoke. Out of his droopily mustachioed mouth he hurled his words, slowly and deliberately at first, then faster, like the rat-a-tat of a machine gun. When a resolution had already been drafted, he stated it, refused to hear any discussion, and with his phrases still reeling toward his confreres, he announced, “
Adopté
,” and sat down, the half-closed eyes under his bushy eyebrows surveying the room.

On either side of the Tiger sat the magnetic British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in town with his mistress, Frances Stevenson; and the enigmatic American President, Woodrow Wilson, whose idealistic thoughts were purely on his new concepts of the League of Nations and the mandate system. “The peoples of the world are awake and the peoples of the world are in the saddle,” Wilson would declare, hoping to spur the former territories of the Germans and the Turks to self-determination.

Down the line from Clemenceau were leaders of Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, China, Japan, Australia—the only missing country being Russia. The proceedings were as formal as the gardens below the tall windows on the far side of the room, and the ministers’ discussions as delicate as the snowflakes that fell outside. The conversation centered on Europe; the East was only a sideshow.

In fact, the delegates sneered at the notion of self-government for either Mesopotamia or Syria, and an often-repeated conversation was overheard among four very high officials:

1st Minister: “I fear that the country may be badly governed.”

2nd Minister: “The country
will
be badly governed.”

3rd Minister: “The country
ought
to be badly governed.”

In the end, neither Syria nor Mesopotamia would be given immediate autonomy; instead, like other regions of the Turkish Empire, they would be placed under the mandate of Britain or France, which hoped to use Wilson’s concept to keep control of the region.

But before that fateful day, and while the discourse continued at the Elysée Palace, a few blocks away in their suites of the Hôtel Crillon the American delegation conferred, and at the Hôtel Majestic and the neighboring Astoria the British contingent held its private meetings. Under the potted palms in the lobbies, and in every corner of the private rooms, the flow of words was tinged with the quest for oil. Petroleum had become the substance of vital interest; without it the British, French and Americans never could have won the war. “The Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil,” proclaimed the British Secretary of State, Lord Curzon. It was evident that it had become a strategic necessity; national security now depended upon oil, and the leading figures of Britain were called to the conference for consultation. “Every day,” Chirol observed, “there was a constant coming and going of experts specially summoned from England, of legislators and jurists, of bankers and economists, of captains of industry and commerce, of all the best brains in fact which the country could muster.” On issues of the East, the potential source of that precious petroleum, Arthur Balfour, Arthur Hirtzel and Edwin Montagu huddled intently, while the exotic figure of Faisal, robed in flowing silks, moved like a graceful symbol through the corridors; at his elbow always was the small, odd figure of a khaki-suited,
kafeeyah
-clad T. E. Lawrence.

In the aftermath of the war, the Sharif Hussein, who, with his son Faisal had helped the British defeat the Turks, expected to be duly rewarded. His expressed desire was to create an Arab kingdom that included Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. He wanted the throne of the Hejaz, his Arabian turf, for himself, and he wanted two of his sons formally installed to the north: Faisal (already there) in Damascus; Abdullah, his eldest son, in Baghdad. If the French wanted to keep Lebanon, with its mostly Christian population, he might agree. But the French were not willing to give up any of Syria nor were the British delegates ready to hand over Iraq.

Faisal and Lawrence had come from London, where, on January 3, 1919, Faisal signed an agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on the principle of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Afterward they set off for Paris, where the three met again. With the help of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, General Allenby’s Chief of Intelligence and a member of the British team, Faisal composed a letter to Felix Frankfurter, head of the American Zionist delegation:

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race … [and] have suffered similar oppression at the hands of powers stronger than themselves.… We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.… We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome here.… People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need for co-operation of the Arabs and Zionists, have been trying to exploit the local difficulties that must necessarily arise in Palestine in the early stage of our movements.

The letter, signed by Faisal, became a fragment of a history torn apart by bitterness and tragedy.

It would take nearly thirty years of violent uprisings and a brutal war between the Zionists and the Arabs before the Jewish state would come into existence, in 1948, and almost a half-century more before the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine recognized each other’s right to a homeland. But this early letter is testament to the fact that the Hussein clan, alone among the Arab leaders, was well intentioned toward the Jews. Later, Faisal’s brother Abdullah, the first ruler of TransJordan, and his successor and grandson, King Hussein of Jordan, would make that clear in their readiness to accept a Jewish state.

But it was a far greater ambition that brought the desert prince Faisal to Paris. Together with Lawrence he set out to convince the French that, with his government already installed in Damascus, they should anoint him King of Syria. The Paris Peace talks had commenced on January 23, 1919, and within two weeks the colorful pair of Lawrence and Faisal was called to appear before the Council of Four. Lawrence, dressed in white robes and gold-braided headdress, had no official position; an eccentric at once flashy and shy, he held his only acknowledged role as Faisal’s translator. As an advocate for the Arab leader, he was a questionable character; to many in the British Foreign Service, he was not to be trusted. He had even been shunted off to the Continentale, a lesser hotel.

It was to the gold-robed Faisal that Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George and the Italian Premier, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, leaned forward and listened closely. Without notes, without hesitation, in a resonant voice and mesmerizing cadence, the Arab commander spoke. No one of Western origin, not even Lawrence, matched the Emir’s mystique. When Faisal opened his mouth, said an American lawyer at the talks, “his voice seemed to breathe the perfume of frankincense and to suggest the presence of richly coloured divans, green turbans and the glitter of gold and jewels.” He delivered his speech in Arabic, with Lawrence loosely translating, but the Turkish-educated Faisal stunned his audience by answering questions in colloquial French. Faisal’s presence had the force of an electromagnetic field, drawing in Lloyd George, who declared firmly that the British would not let down their Arab allies, repelling Clemenceau, who angrily reminded his English colleague of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The fate of that pact seemed oddly marked: only a few days earlier, on February 2, in the midst of an epidemic in Paris, Mark Sykes had died of the flu.

For several weeks the Eastern question was on the table. Faisal and Lawrence did all they could, beguiling, cajoling, even rattling sabers as Faisal threatened to rouse the Arabs of Syria and the Hejaz in a
jihad
against the French. But that not only angered the French; it infuriated the British, who were caught in a compromising position. They had made promises to both Faisal’s father, the Sharif Hussein, and the French, vowing that each would have control over Syria. Britain had no wish now to support either one in another costly war. The problem had reached an impasse: Faisal, the self-declared King, was insistent on keeping the throne; the French, who long ago had claimed their stake, were not about to give up Syria.

When Gertrude arrived at the Majestic on Easter Sunday 1919 to promote the Arab cause, she was introduced at once to the intriguing figure of Faisal. Few knew his background: his parents were cousins; his father, the guardian of Mecca; his mother, an Arab peasant from the same town. Born in the desert, he had been taken to Constantinople when his father was put under Ottoman watch. He grew up sickly. As a young man he picked at his food, smoked a great deal and developed a love of classical Arabic poetry, but along the way he also learned to shoot well and to ride horses and camels with the skill of the Bedouin he was. Tall, thin, darkly dramatic, a noble born of fine stock, he had the virile look of a desert Arab, the polished manners of a cosmopolitan Turkish pasha, the charm and charisma of a leader. Talking with Gertrude, he knew how to flatter her femininity, excite her with his own political ambitions.

They spoke for only a few minutes before Faisal went off for a meeting. Left with his doctor and his private secretary, Rustam Haidar (French-speaking like Faisal, educated at the Sorbonne), Gertrude told them what she had heard. Conditions in Syria were not good, her informers had said. Daily living had become more difficult. Faisal must make an agreement with the French, she advised. The Americans could not help, and the British did not want to interfere. Later, the two men repeated the conversation to Lawrence. “Miss Bell has a poor mind,” he retorted. “You should not attach any importance to what she says.” But Lawrence’s romantic attitude would fail Faisal in the end. Gertrude’s approach was far more pragmatic.