Page 197 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ORIENTAL SECRETARY 179

She was now the official correspondent of the Bureau and the
only woman who was formally part of the Expeditionary Force
in Mesopotamia. She was shortly to become, in addition, Sir Percy
Cox’s Oriental Secretary, responsible for dealing with local not­
ables and filtering them through to her chief. She undoubtedly
found solace in her new work, a barrier against any too vivid a
memory of recent events. But that apart, she was by nature a pro­
digious worker, and the dual task which confronted her was tailor
made. Nobody was more capable of taking the bare bones of a
contemporary happening and giving them historical flesh. She
began to make the first of her major contributions to Hogarth’s
Arab Bulletin, now a regular fortnightly document, to assemble
intelligence information from briefings with the army authorities
and interviews with tribal shaikhs, to translate the Arabic corre­
spondence of the office, and—as was to become her increasing
habit — to take on tasks which some of her colleagues considered
to be the proper preserve of the chief of the civil administration.
One of the first jobs she undertook was to write to Ibn Rashid
with a plea that he should preserve his neutrality. Her letter,
written in May, according to a subsequent note to her parents, had
litde effect on that irresponsible and recalcitrant young man,
which would not have surprised her or Cox if they had turned to
the files in their own office in which Captain Shakespear and the
former Resident Lorimer had warned that no good would ever
come of trying to accommodate Ibn Rashid and to set him up as
a counter to the ambitions of the rising star of the desert, Ibn
Saud. ‘We didn’t succeed in roping in Ibn Rashid. Everything
that could be done was done; he was forgiven seventy times seven,
but he wouldn’t listen to our piping ... He’s ignorant and foolish
beyond belief... But it’s not the immediate war problems here I
think of most; it’s the problems after the war, and I don’t know
what sort of hand we shall be able to take in solving them.’ It is
remarkable how much highly confidential information she was
able to pass to her parents and to Chirol in those days of censor­
ship; but the censor’s pencil never held much fear for Gertrude,
any more than did the conventions of Government service which
at the very least frown on open criticism of superiors. The ever­
present tragedy of the civil power in these early days of the
Mesopotamian campaign was the deaths of Lt-Colonel Lorimer
and Captain Shakespear in 1914 and 1915 respectively. Lorimer
had been moved from Baghdad (where by virtue of the rising
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