Page 212 - Life of Gertrude Bell

194 GERTRUDE BELL
able than Gertrude to meet their needs. In the past year she
had contributed a flow of well-written, informative articles to
Hogarth’s Arabian Report and Arab Bulletin, and had maintained
day by day an output of intelligence information based on her
military and civil interrogations of Arabs and Turks. In October
there was a treatise on ‘The Basis of Government in Turkish
Arabia’, with a typically assertive early statement-‘And he who,
without being guilty of incautious curiosity, was forced by circum­
stances to test the relations that existed between documentary
evidence a la tnrqne and the hard facts of the Ottoman Empire,
was apt to find himself lost in bewildered annoyance, not un-
accompanied by uncontrollable hilarity... That the Turkish
Empire should have run at all was, at a hasty appreciation, a
matter for marvel...’; followed by an appraisal of the Ottoman
law. There followed a summary which should have been framed
in every office of the British administration:
... men who have kept the tradition of a personal independence,
which was limited only by their own customs, entirely ignorant
of a world which lay outside their swamps and pastures, and as
entirely indifferent to its interests as to the opportunities it
offers, will not in a day fall into step with European ambitions,
nor welcome European methods. Nor can they be hastened ...
In our own history, from the Moot Court through Magna
Charter to the Imperial Parliament was the work of centuries,
yet the first contained the grain of all that came after.

There followed bulletins on subjects as diverse as the tribal
authorities and backgrounds of the great shaikhs of Arabia;
rivalries and rebellion in Muscat and Oman; and the tribal fights
of the Shamiyah: ‘Human nature being what it is — and at bottom
the same in the Arab as in the European, pugnacious, ambitious
and covetous, sometimes loyal but mainly treacherous, occasion­
ally enlightened but always restless—the tribal fights in the
Shamiyah desert may be expected to exhibit the same to and fro,
change and interchange, of alliances, as may be found in the
history of the relations between the various nations which compose
Europe.’ Even the Whitehall Treasury, sick as it was of Arabia and
Arabs and the assumptions of the British who moved among them
that the Chancellor had access to a bottomless [pit of money,
looked forward to reading Gertrude’s compositions. Along with
Hogarth and Lawrence, she provided war-time reading which has