Desert Queen (73 page)

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.

E
arly 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.

A
side 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.

“D
o 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.”