Page 210 - Life of Gertrude Bell

I92 GERTRUDE BELL

every observation with ‘on the contrary’, and Dobbs, both im­
mensely able administrators with sharp wits and opinions of their
own. When Young was sent to Nasiriyali as A.P.O. his nearest
neighbour was a young officer named Captain H. R. P. Dickson
who ‘maintained British authority by sheer force of personality*.
Others gradually came on the scene, often men of exceptional
ability—Ronald Wingate, son of the Sirdar; Lionel Smith, Dean
1 ')
of Magdalen and tutor to Edward(VII before the war; historians
C. J. Edmonds, S. H. Longrigg, and many others. It is small
wonder that there were differences of opinion about the future
role of Britain in that country, differences which were to broaden
into personal animosities and occasionally into lifelong feuds,
though for the moment they were kept in check by the demands
of administering vast territories inhabited by recalcitrant and
sometimes hostile people, with few physical resources and litde
money. The two women of this fraternity, Gertrude and Mrs
Lorimer, took it upon themselves to maintain order among so
many disparate and opinionated men, lecturing them like school­
mistresses or surrogate mothers when the occasion arose. Perhaps
Mrs Lorimer delivered the most telling reprimand when she wrote
Philby a letter which, according to his biographer, he kept for the
rest of his life. Following a quarrel he had had with her husband
at Amara she remarked: ‘When a young man without very wide
experience finds himself differing about practical policy from an
older man and senior official acting in circumstances of which the
former knows nothing, it is sound for him to assume that there
may be two sides to a question. This I think is an unimpeachable
general principle ...9 Gertrude told the vituperative Philby, who
was to become in the course of time one of the most brilliant of all
Arabists, that he was ‘too domineering and difficult’ and ‘too
ready to come to blows with the military authorities’. Battle lines
were drawn up early in the life of the British administration, but
for the moment attitudes were tempered by the army’s progress
towards Baghdad.
By early March 1917 Gertrude was able to tell her father: ‘That’s
the end of the German dream of domination in the Near East —
Berlin-Baghdad and all the rest. Their place is not going to be
in the sun; it would have been if they had left well alone and not
tried to force the pace by war. We had, in my opinion, for all
practical purposes resigned this country to them and they knew
it well enough. Now they’re out of it forever I hope, and they