Page 184 - Life of Gertrude Bell

166 GERTRUDE BELL
in culture, and the Arab unionist movement has scarcely begun
there. \\ c shall not be able to annex either of the two provinces,
Bastar or the Iraq, but no one will object to our administration
there if it is not graduated through an Indian bureaucracy.
Colonisation would have to be very carefully and delicately
handled. I could write a great deal on that subject but I won’t 1 ...

Gertrude’s grasp of the political issues was amply shown in that
letter, written only a month after joining the rudimentary Arab
Bureau in Cairo. Equally, the contradictions which were to dog
Britain and her allies in the peninsula for generations to come arc
not hard to detect. Lands were being apportioned which had
never belonged to either Britain or France, and which did not
exist in the Arab mind, for no Arab was a Syrian or Mesopo­
tamian—he had never heard such names, being Damascene, or
Beiruti or Aleppi perhaps, or a Shammari or Ruwelli, but never a
‘national’ in the Western sense. Britain, in any case, had yet to
conquer the vilayets of the Ottoman Empire to which she and
France attached convenient but meaningless labels. Gertrude
departed as Hogarth returned to the scene, an honorary Lt-Com-
mandcr in the Royal Navy, to take effective charge of the Bureau
under Clayton’s overall direction. Storrs remained in the back­
ground, fastidious in habit and choice of friends, conversing on
art and classical music in Arabic and German and translating
Husain’s wordy communications into English. Lawrence, con­
temptuous of the military, was made a temporary captain in the
army; and he was soon to be fitted up with Arab dress of pure
silk, with gold-threaded agal and gilded sword, at the insistence
of Faisal, son of the Sharif, at a cost, it is said, of £20,000. The
desert was thick with messengers carrying demands for money
and territory from the Sharif, and the Foreign Secretary asked
McMahon to check the translation of a document on one occasion.
Does he ‘demand or request’? he asked. Graves, Newcombe,
Dawnay, George Lloyd and others gathered around, and
McMahon carried on his negotiations with the Sharif. During
1915, Hogarth had started to produce at frequent but irregular
intervals a secret intelligence document called the Arabian Report
which was issued by the Admiralty to carefully selected individuals
in Government service. In February 1916, it became the Arab
Bulletin and Gertrude made the first of a long and brilliant series
of contributions to its pages.