Page 248 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)_Neat

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GERTRUDE BELL
usually polished and quiet, more like a Turkish Mufti.9 Philby
asked him if he could make his return journey by land through the
Hijaz. The king refused, remarking that ‘People were saying that
he had sold his country to the English’. As Philby went to take his
leave the old man said to the English party that ‘they would come
in due course to accept his view of Ibn Saud’s unworthiness\
Philby replied: ‘I was sent to Najd by the British Government to
see things with my own eyes, and it is my misfortune that I have
arrived at conclusions widely differing from those of Your
Majesty.’ Hogarth, said Philby, averted his eyes. Now, in 1920, a
desert force called the Ikhwan, the Brotherhood, reviving the old
religious fanaticism of the Wahhabi kingdom, was on the rampage
and had already opened Ibn Saud’s pathway to Mecca. Three times
in 1918, Husain’s forces attacked the Saudi sympathisers of the
oasis of Khurma. In August of that year Philby wrote a memor­
andum to the Government in which he said: ‘Ibn Saud most un­
doubtedly claims Khurma as being within his jurisdiction—he
does so not only on religious and territorial grounds but also on
historical, administrative and tribal grounds. He therefore con­
siders the Sharif’s action as aggressive and hostile to himself.’ In
August, Wilson Pasha, Wingate’s representative in the Hijaz,
declared: ‘Khurma belongs to Husain.’ Backed by British words,
if not deeds, Husain decided to try again in 1919. His army was
annihilated. In 1920 the House of Rashid, Ibn Saud’s bitter rivals
in Najd, succumbed to the last of a long series of royal homicides.
Saud ibn Rashid, the young ruler who had been in the care of the
Sharif in his youth and had been the ally, however unreliable, of
the Turks, became the last victim of a bloody history of murder
and dishonour. By that time Britain, encouraged by Hogarth and
Lawrence, had begun to toy with the idea of an alliance between
the Rashids and Husain to bolster the tottering power of its Arab
proteges. But it was too late. Early in 1921 Ibn Saud took Hail.

In August 1920 the Iraqi insurrectionists claimed their most dis­
tinguished victim, Colonel Leachman, explorer and soldier of
fortune. In March, Leachman had been posted to Dulaim on the
Upper Euphrates, following an operation for appendicitis. He
occupied a district which for four years had been the centre of
looting and murder, but he gave as good as he got among the
wild men who surrounded him. Several officers had been killed
but the intrepid Leachman was not perturbed. On August 12th