Page 180 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

i6o GERTRUDE BELL

Abdullah’s message was received, Kitchener sent another
telegram:

Lord Kitchener’s salaam to the Sharif Abdullah. Germany has
bought the Turkish Government with gold, notwithstanding
that England, France and Russia guaranteed the integrity of
the Ottoman Empire if it remained neutral in this war. The
Turkish Government have against the wish of the Sultan
through German pressure committed acts of war by invading
the frontiers of Egypt... If the Arab nation assist England in
this war that has been forced on us by Turkey, England will
guarantee that no internal intervention takes place in Arabia
and will give the Arabs every assistance against external
foreign aggression. It may be that an Arab of the true race
will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina and so good
may come by the help of God out of all the evil which is now
occurring.

Kitchener’s message was delivered five days before Turkey came
into the war. It made the first reference in an official document to
the ‘Arab Nation’, an idea foreign to every Arab except perhaps
the ambitious Sharif of Mecca; it implied a promise of the
Caliphate which had nothing whatever to do with Britain; and
it marked the beginning of negotiations which were to go on for
eighteen months until the Sharif of Mecca believed himself to be,
and called himself, the ‘King of the Arab Lands’, and until he and
his sons had been promised virtually the entire peninsula.

In 1936, Gertrude’s most distinguished successor among women
travellers in Arabia, Freya Stark, wrote to Venetia Buddicom: ‘A
publisher asks if I will write a life of Gertrude Bell. I don’t know
what to say. I don’t know if I want to write anything; on the
other hand I should like to get all that Eastern Arab history clear
in my own mind. I am not very fascinated by her as a woman
Her desire to clarify her view of eastern Arabian politics would
have met with formidable difficulties at that time, when none of
the official documents were available. Even since those documents -
or most of them—have become available, many a noted historian
has tried to find his way through that labyrinth of opinions,
myths and legends, and outright lies, and has had to admit in the
end that he has been dealing not so much with fact as with
romance At least we now have access to some of the bricks