Page 279 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

faisal’s kingdom *53
Holland that he learnt languages as a mental exercise, one after
another, like an intellectual gymnast in training.
Though she felt deeply her gradual exclusion from political
affairs, she seemed happy among the antiquities of Iraq and in the
company of her devoted friend Hajji Naji, an old man on whose
ground her own home was situated and who delighted to share
with her the simple pleasures of his blossoming trees and shrubs
and the chorus of his nightingales, and who each year took the
first of his fruit to her. As director of antiquities she supervised
the activities of the new generation of British and American
archaeologists who came to dig and she had many an argument
with her old colleagues Campbell Thompson, Hall, Woolley and
members of the American team from the University of Pennsyl­
vania, but she held the balance between them and their rival
claims, and with her great knowledge and emphatic manner
usually won them over to her way of thinking whenever there
was a dispute regarding the allocation of finds. Baghdad, rightly,
became the world’s chief storehouse of the treasures of Babylon,
Assyria, Sumer and Chaldea under her aegis. Up to this time her
office had consisted of a single room in the serai of the royal palace.
Now she was promised a more suitable building.
A peace treaty with Turkey was signed in October 1922 and
confirmed at Lausanne in July 1923 in the wake of Mustafa
Kamal’s spectacular revival of Turkish ambition and virility. The
protocol which governed Britain’s alliance with Faisal cut down
the period of the treaty from twenty years to four from the ratifi­
cation of Lausanne, and provided that if Iraq was meanwhile
elected to the League of Nations, Britain’s responsibility would
end immediately. The Iraqi Assembly proceeded to attack the
treaty as being ungenerous and inadequate, and there were riots
and murders in consequence during 1923 and 1924. The treaty
and its subsidiary agreements were put by Britain before the
League of Nations on September 20th, 1924 and they were
accepted as giving effect to the provisions of the Covenant of the
League. King George V and Faisal I of Iraq ratified them on
December 12 th, 1924.
Though Gertrude had less and less to do with the British
administration and the Iraqi court, she continued to keep an eye
on the King’s young son Ghazi, the heir to the throne, and to
help him with his English lessons. She was still busy with her
weekly intelligence reports, articles for the Colonial Office’s home