Page 209 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

ORIENTAL SECRETARY 189
over all the British civil and military chiefs, did not seem to him
to be in keeping with the dignity of man. And many a Najdi
audience has been tickled to uproarious merriment by his mimick­
ing of her shrill voice and feminine patter: “Abdul Aziz I Abdul
Azizl look at this, and what do you think of that?” and so forth.*
One positive result of the meeting between Ibn Saud and Cox
was the temporary suspension of one of the Amir’s most rigorous
desert campaigns. Ever since the battle of Jarab in 1915 at which
Shakespear was killed, Abdul Aziz had been determined to
destroy the Ajman tribe whose desertion caused that death and let
Ibn Rashid’s army off the hook. He pursued them to Kuwait
where to his intense anger they were given refuge by the Shaikh
after a battle in which Ibn Saud himself was wounded and his
favourite brother, Saad, was lulled. It was a major feat of diplo­
macy on Cox’s part to persuade him to give up that pursuit,
however temporarily.
Gertrude’s description of the visit to Basra appeared in the Arab
Bulletin of January 12th, 1917. It was a generous and accurate
portrayal of the great Arab leader, whose qualities had perhaps
suggested to her that rather than toying with the Rashid family
and the princes of Mecca, both Britain and the Turks would have
done well to take him seriously from the beginning. It was one
of Gertrude’s best-known contributions to the Bulletin and was
subsequently reproduced in the Arab War. It recounted the exile
of the Sauds in Kuwait following the ascent of Muhammad ibn
Rashid, ‘Doughty’s grudging host’ in Najd. It told of the young
Abdul Aziz ‘eating the bread of adversity’ while he waited under
the protection of Shaikh Mubarak; of his return to Riyadh on the
first day of 1902 and the fight to recover the lands of his forefathers;
of the battle of Jarab and the death of Captain Shakespear, and it
describes the ceremony at Kuwait on November 20th, 1916. ‘On
that memorable occasion three powerful Arab chiefs, the Shaikh
of Muhammerah, who though a Persian subject is of Arab stock,
the Shaikh of Kuwait and Ibn Saud, Hakim of Najd, stood side by
side in amity and concord and proclaimed their adherence to the
British cause.’ A brief reference to Ibn Saud’s speech, ‘as spontan­
eous as it was unexpected’, and then a characteristic descriptive
passage:

Ibn Saud is now barely forty, though he looks some years older.
He is a man of splendid physique, standing well over six feet,