Page 205 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ORIENTAL SECRETARY 187
son Faisal took up the cudgels in company with the men of the
Bureau, and set out on a path that was to make him Gertrude’s
protdgd in Iraq, as post-war Mesopotamia came to be named.
Mark Sykes produced a regular summary of the Arab Bureau’s
intelligence reports for the benefit of Britain’s military and civil
leaders. It was invariably hotheaded and usually studied in its
insolence. On one occasion he remarked: ‘In it (Arabian Report
No. XV) Sir Henry McMahon tells Lord Grey that the Sirdar has
told him (Sir Henry McMahon) that he (the Sirdar) proposed to
tell Colonel Wilson to tell the Sharif certain things, but that he
(Sir Henry McMahon) has made certain alterations in the text
which the Sirdar desires Colonel Wilson to convey to the Sharif,
and that the Sirdar concurs in the amendments ... It is very lucky
for us that for the moment nothing is happening in Arabia that
requires either thought or decision ...’ By September, the India
Office was so fed up with his sarcastic intervention that it decided
no longer to send copies of the Arab Bulletin to the Viceroy unless
they contained essential information, and it put a total ban on
Sykes’s summaries —‘They are exasperating even in a temperate
climate,’ wrote Hirtzel. There was a final and appropriately
bizarre drama attached to the Sharif’s revolt. The Viceroy Lord
Chelmsford read about the event in the Press and, indirectly, in
communications from the India Office, but he wondered if he
might see a copy of the proclamation. Nothing arrived for a
month and he complained to London. It was eventually discovered
that someone in the Foreign Office had confused ‘Simla’ with
‘Sirdar’ and his copy had been lying on Wingate’s desk.

As the ‘illicit adventure’ unravelled itself in the Hijaz, Gertrude
was recovering from jaundice, and helping Sir Percy to prepare
for a durbar in Kuwait at which Ibn Saud was to be the guest of
honour and to be made a Knight Commander of the Most
Honourable Order of the Indian Empire. Meanwhile, she went up
to Nasiriyah again, chiefly to inspect the ziggurat of Ur which
she was busily protecting from ‘the ravages of Generals and rail­
way engineers’. In a description of the journey she wrote: ‘From
its summit you can see another immense mound, and then the
desert, and the desert, and the desert. Loftus dug at Ur a long time
ago, but no doubt there is much yet to be explored. The brick
wall is, if I remember, Parthian, though the site goes back to the
beginning of historic time.’ On November 25th she wrote: ‘Sir