Page 220 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

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GERTRUDE BELL
time again. It has been said of them all that if they had a fault it
was that they were over-articulate, that the world might have been
a more peaceful place for future generations if they and their like
had not been such ‘able and persuasive’ writers. In a way, though,
they simply gave expression to a very common English belief
that, when all is said and done, those who appear to wish to
wander freely in the open spaces of the world and who despise
governments of every kind, are in reality merely marking time,
waiting to have conferred upon them the self-evident blessings of
parliamentary democracy and the Stock Exchange.

Gertrude laboured on through the great heat of the summers of
the last two war years, and the equally trying conditions of the wet
and muddy winters, producing a massive output of work. By the
middle of 1917 she was working on her sixth paper on Turkey;
she had written another report on Ibn Saud running to twenty-
five pages and setting out the complex relations between Britain,
the Amir and that mercurial Iraqi Sayid Talib, who she said ‘had
tried to get Britain to engage his services in the event of war,
through Shaikh Khazal (of Muhammerah), but his terms were too
extravagant’. There were her weekly I.E.F. ‘D’ intelligence sum­
maries ; countless memos on the shaikhs and tribes in and around
Mesopotamia; a note on the transliteration of Arabic for the
London School of Oriental Studies; a translation and codifica­
tion of the Shia Traditions; reports on Syria and Mesopotamia;
several major contributions to Hogarth’s ’Bulletin; a report on
Ismail Bey, ‘the most formidable figure in northern Mesopotamian
politics in the last 10 years of Abdul Hamid’s reign’, who gave
himself up to the British in December 1917; a report on Sadun
Pasha, chief of the large and troublesome Muntafiq tribal con-
federation; a long paper on the situation in Hail. She also took on
the editorship of the official Arabic newspaper Al Arab, with a
roguish monk from Beirut as her deputy. And all the time she
maintained a prodigious flow of letters to her parents, friends and
officials of government. She seemed content with her life. She
entertained extensively in her Baghdad home, her relationships
with the young men of the military and civil authorities were
pleasantly friendly, and with the women guarded. She had found
a new home and a new life. She spoke of‘carrying on an existence’
among people she loved. That was almost certainly the truth of