Page 209 - Life of Gertrude Bell

A change of government gave a new complexion to the military
and political institutions of Britain in the Middle East. The
moment was opportune for a shake-up. Sir Archibald Murray’s
Egyptian Expeditionary force had pushed the Turks out of Sinai
in the latter part of 1916. The Mesopotamian army, now under
the fourth of its commanders, Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley
Maude, ‘Systematic Joe’ as he was called by his men, had begun
to advance with better planning and equipment than hitherto,
along the road that had led to earlier disasters. The Sirdar,
General Sir Reginald Wingate, had taken over as High Com­
missioner in Cairo. The carnage continued on the western front,
but elsewhere there were gleams of hope. Gertrude received a
C.B.E. in the honours list which marked the change to the war
coalition.
The war inevitably brought its crop of personalities to Meso­
potamia. As the retreat from Ctesiphon began, Philby, Hubert
Young and D. L. R. Lorimer arrived as Assistant Political
Officers. Captain A. T. Wilson was already there, a pre-war assist­
ant to Cox in the Gulf and one of the most powerful personalities
in the eastern administration. Even among the outstanding men
and women around him, ‘AT’ was prominent. Hubert Young,
who had already moved with Dawnay, Joyce and Lawrence
among Faisal’s warriors around Wadi Sirhan in the Syrian desert,
and who was to play a part in the subsequent Arabian settlements,
found Wilson too powerful a personality to work with. ‘I admired
him immensely,’ he wrote, ‘and I liked him personally, but he was
a great centraliser, and I have always felt that actual physical
separation is a great factor.’ Cox was the first to agree that they
should be kept apart. There was Bullard too, who responded to