Page 216 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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GERTRUDE BELL
directions insisting that they be issued to the Press and announcing
that he wished to see them in ‘the Arab Press, the Times of India
and the Illustrated London News’.
By the end of May Storrs had gone back to Cairo and Gertrude
returned to her shaikhs and to the routine of the Political Office
where already plans were being laid for the aftermath of hostilities.
Cox, the supreme diplomat of the East, towered over the procccd-
ings by his very presence. Tall and slim, urbane in manner and
impeccable in dress, he was respected by everyone and so could
command the support of his divergent crew even when there
were disagreements on matters of policy. Even so, those dis­
agreements existed and they were beginning to show themselves
if only over meals in the mess where headquarters staff and the
Political Officers in the held were able to meet and talk. Many of
the A.P.O.s were young men who administered territories as large
as Wales or Yorkshire, with neidier police nor military assistance
in controlling their lawless tribes. It was they who came face to
face with the real problems. But unlike Cox and his Baghdad
assistants Philby and Gertrude, tiiey were unaware of the grandi­
ose schemes of Whitehall and the Arab Bureau. When the
Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 and divulged the details of die
Sykes-Picot agreement to Husain in Mecca, everyone became
aware that Britain was intending to stay in Mesopotamia and that
the French would take over Damascus and most of Syria. Cox and
his principal assistants saw no immediate objection to the idea but
the men who had to maintain law and order in the marshes and
deserts and far-flung townships could see disaster clearly written
on the wall. Gertrude had herself seen the dangers inherent in the
idea of Arab nationalism and an externally imposed administra­
tion many years earlier. In The Desert and the Sown she had written:
‘Of what value are the Pan-Arabic associations and inflammatory
leaflets that they issue from foreign printing presses? The answer
is easy: They are worth nothing at all. There is no nation of
Arabs; the Syrian merchant is separated by a wider gulf from die
badawin than he is from the Osmanli, the Syrian country is in­
habited by Arabic speaking races all eager to be at each other’s
throats, and only prevented from fulfilling their natural desires by
the rugged half-fed soldier who draws at rare intervals die Sultan s
pay.’ In her later work, Amnratb to Avmrath,, she recounted die
impressions she had formed in the Mosul region after the Young
Turks’ revolution: c... nowhere will the Arab nationalist move-