Page 177 - Life of Gertrude Bell

THE ARAB BUREAU 159
back to Cairo but was intercepted at Dover where a telephone
message from the Prime Minister was delivered asking him to
return to London. His appointment as War Minister followed.
Sir Henry McMahon the Foreign Secretary to the Government of
India, who was also in England at the time, was appointed to
Cairo as Resident in his stead. Kitchener was not pleased by his
detention in London and it is said that he spent some time at the
Foreign Office discussing Egyptian affairs, before being called to
a private meeting at io Downing Street on August 5 th to be told
that he was summoned to join the Government. Before he left
for Dover a few days earlier he had let it be known that he still
wanted to be Viceroy of India. In 1910, when Hardinge’s pre­
decessor Lord Minto was seriously ill, the King was said to be
‘violently in favour of sending Kitchener back’. Lord Morley, the
Secretary of State, refused the King’s wish as Kitchener ‘had
become hopelessly idle’. But the old soldier’s popularity widi the
British public was such that his claims could not be denied in war.
In the first month of his vitally important job as War Minister he
meddled constantly in Arabian and Egyptian matters, and it was
a telegram of his on September 24th, 1914 to the Residency in
Cairo which began a chain of events that was to cause intermin­
able rivalries among the allied powers, realignment of loyalties
among the Arabs, and die making and breaking of promises on a
heroic scale. His message referred to an intelligence report of
September 6th regarding the attitude of Husain the Sharif of
Mecca, and went on: ‘Tell Storrs to send secret and carefully
chosen messenger from me to Sharif Abdullah to ascertain
whether should present armed German influence at Constantinople
coerce Caliph against his will, and Sublime Porte to acts of
aggression and war against Great Britain, he and his father and
Arabs of Hijaz would be with us or against us.’
The reply came more than a month later, on October 31st. It
said that die messenger had returned from Mecca and that
Abdullah’s response was ‘guarded, but friendly and favourable’,
and that he desired a closer understanding with Britain. Lord
Kitchener was reminded that the message only repeated proposals
made to His Majesty’s Agency on January 8th, when he had met
Abdullah in Cairo. There was also reference to a private con­
versation with the messenger, Muhammad Farouki, in the course
of which he is alleged to have said, ‘Stretch out to us a helping
hand and we will never aid these oppressors’. On the day that