Page 203 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ORIENTAL SECRETARY i85
Turkish Government amongst the Moslem Rulers and Emirs
were the Emirs of Mecca ...
There followed the announcement of the rising and the final
appeal to God ‘who is our sufficient defender’. Thus began a
saga which was to infuriate the G.O.C.-in-Chief Egypt and the
Viceroy of India, help to discredit the British Government, cause
a rift among the allies, absorb millions of pounds of public money,
cause dissension among the most famous and reliable fighting
forces in British India, and find its way into the history books by
virtue of the English public’s insatiable need for heroes as the
private war of an Englishman called ‘Aurens’, better known to
the Arabs as ‘Abu Khayyal’ or ‘Father of the Shadow’.
It is not easy in retrospect to comprehend the activities of the
Arab Bureau opposed, as they were, by the Prime Minister, the
Secretary of State for India, the Viceroy, the Chief of the Imperial
General Staff and, not least, the G.O.C.-in-Chief Egypt. Yet
junior officers in the Bureau’s service were able to wander freely
around the Middle East with inexhaustible supplies of money, in
defiance of generals and in open contempt of official policies and
campaign strategies, at a time when the allied cause and the lives
of millions of men hung in the balance. The only possible explana­
tion is to be found in Kitchener’s early support. So strange a
creature as the Bureau, nominally owned by the Foreign Office,
funded by the War Office and effectively controlled by the
Admiralty, could not have survived without the most powerful
of patrons. It was one of the supreme ironies of history that on
the very day that the Arabs raised their banners in revolt, Field
Marshal Lord Kitchener was drowned when the cruiser Hampshire
sank in the icy waters of the North Sea.

On July 6th there was a meeting of the War Committee, called at
the request of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General
Sir William Robertson, to discuss the Arab Revolt. Sykes was
asked to address the Committee. He said that the Government
should adopt a consistent pro-Arab policy in the Middle East and
that in execution of that policy Sir Percy Cox should be appointed
High Commissioner of Eastern Arabia, Hadramaut and Aden,
and should be directly responsible to the Foreign Office instead of
the Indian Government ‘as at present’. Cox would have charge of
all negotiations with the Arab tribes ‘from Aden to Mesopotamia