Page 212 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)
P. 212

I92                   GERTRUDE BELL
                 every observation with ‘on the contrary’, and Dobbs, both im­
                 mensely able administrators with sharp wits and opinions of their
                 own. When Young was sent to Nasiriyah as A.P.O. his nearest
                 neighbour was a young officer named Captain H. R. P. Dickson
                 who ‘maintained British authority by sheer force of personality*.
                 Others gradually came on the scene, often men of exceptional
                 ability— Ronald Wingate, son of the Sirdar; Lionel Smith, Dean
       vu\   t   of Magdalen and tutor to Edward(VII before the war; historians
                 C. J. Edmonds, S. H. Longrigg, and many others. It is small
                 wonder that there were differences of opinion about the future
                 role of Britain in that country, differences which were to broaden
                 into personal animosities and occasionally into lifelong feuds,
                 though for the moment they were kept in check by the demands
                 of administering vast territories inhabited by recalcitrant and
                 sometimes hostile people, with few physical resources and litde
                 money. The two women of this fraternity, Gertrude and Mrs
                 Lorimer, took it upon themselves to maintain order among so
                 many disparate and opinionated men, lecturing them like school­
                 mistresses or surrogate mothers when the occasion arose. Perhaps
                 Mrs Lorimer delivered the most telling reprimand when she wrote
                 Philby a letter which, according to his biographer, he kept for the
                 rest of his life. Following a quarrel he had had with her husband
                 at Amara she remarked: ‘When a young man without very wide
                 experience finds himself differing about practical policy from an
                 older man and senior official acting in circumstances of which the
                 former knows nothing, it is sound for him to assume that there
                 may be two sides to a question. This I think is an unimpeachable
                 general principle ... ’ Gertrude told the vituperative Philby, who
                 was to become in the course of time one of the most brilliant of all
                 Arabists, that he was ‘too domineering and difficult’ and ‘too
                 ready to come to blows with the military authorities’. Battle lines
                 were  drawn up early in the life of the British administration, but
                 for the moment attitudes were tempered by the army’s progress
                 towards Baghdad.
                   By early March 1917 Gertrude was able to tell her father: ‘That’s
                 the end of the German dream of domination in die Near East —
                 Berlin-Baghdad and all the rest. Their place is not going to be
                 in the sun; it would have been if they had left well alone and not
                 tried to force the pace by war. We had, in my opinion, for all
                 practical purposes resigned this country to them and they knew
                 it well enough. Now they’re out of it forever I hope, and they
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