Page 195 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ORIENTAL SECRETARY 177
and placing her services at Cox’s disposal granting her a fixed
allowance a month for them ... She is herself quite prepared
prima facie to fall in with the arrangement.’
Next day Hirtzel entered a minute in the India Office records:
‘Whole position of Arab Bureau and everything connected with
it unsatisfactory. But Clayton being asked to come to London as
soon as possible ... Miss Bell’s knowledge is of course enormous.’
The anger of the generals in Mesopotamia at the Bureau’s foolish
and provocative antics was at boiling point, and General Lake,
latest of the army commanders there, telegraphed: ‘I find it
difficult to accept position implied without full discussion ... The
experiment made in attempting to handle affairs in Iraq through
Cairo without previously consulting us can hardly be regarded as
fortunate ... During past few weeks the experience gained by one
or two officers in Cairo who have paid visits here has I hope
resulted in a considerable removal of wrong impressions.’
‘Seem to be getting into a tangle,’ wrote Hirtzel. Almost the
same words were to be used by the Secretary of State Austen
Chamberlain before he resigned his Cabinet post in the backlash
of the Mesopotamian disasters and the Arab Revolt.
No sooner had Cox and the Generals got rid of Lawrence and
Herbert than Lloyd appeared on the scene. At the moment of the
Kut debacle, he was in Basra making his own plans for the Bureau
office there. He wrote to Wingate, now playing an increasingly
important part in Bureau affairs, on May 27th:

My dear General,
I have delayed in writing to you until I had some time in which
to size things up a litde here, as owing to having missed
Lawrence on my arrival here I had to begin rather in the dark.
As regards the general situation here things are for the time at
a standstill... the Government of India seem to have been
doubly cursed with a Commander in Chief with too little grip
and a Finance Member called Mayer with too much... The
Turks have now retired on one bank of the river, probably
because they have succeeded in giving us the knock they
desired...
Then to the Arab Bureau:

Cox has talked to me a good deal about this, and when I arrived
I found him still not fully alive to the main objects of the thing ...