Page 217 - Life of Gertrude Bell

IRAQ 199
mcnt, if it reaches the blossoming point, find a more congenial
soil, and nowhere will it be watered by fuller streams of lawless
vanity. Cruel and bloody as Ottoman rule has shown itself upon
these remote frontiers, it is better than the untrammelled mastery
of Arab Beg or Kurdish Agha, and if the half exterminated
Christian sects, the persecuted Yezidis, the wretched fellahin of
every creed, who sow in terror crops which they may never reap,
are to win protection and prosperity, it is to die Turk that they
must look/ It had always been the view of Hogarth, from whom
Gertrude derived much of her philosophy of government in the
East, that with all their faults, the Turks had half a millennium of
experience in these territories which could not be thrown over­
board with impunity. By the end of the year 1917, however, Cox
and his Oriental Secretary were already looking to the implemen­
tation of the plans of Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay to administer
these vast tracts of Arab-occupied land. In June Gertrude re­
ceived from the Foreign Office a copy of die still secret agreement
between Sykes and M. Georges Picot, with a request for her
comments. She wrote a lengthy appraisal of the document and she
made special reference to paragraph (2) which read: ‘They [the
Allies] propose to replace it [Ottoman sovereignty] by a dual
control, half French and half British, each zone being further
divided into two parts, the one completely under foreign ad­
ministration, die other more or less autonomous under foreign
guidance/ At the head of her report, Gertrude observed: ‘A bold
and decided policy previously agreed upon by all concerned in
regard to Arab national aspirations/ And in the main body of her
report she said: ‘The policy implied by these aims is wholly in
consonance with the fundamental principles to uphold which the
Allies embarked upon war with the Central European powers; is
one which commends itself to those who wish to see one of the
great races of the world given scope to develop and use its special
capacities in its own way, and to those who hold that civilisation
is better served by the amicable co-operation of different racial
units than by attempting to ignore or suppress essential diverg­
ence/
If there was contradiction in her observations over the decade
which separated her first writings on the subject from those of
1917, it must be conceded that she was not alone in her inconsis­
tency. Hogarth, Sykes, Lawrence and the others involved in this
tight-rope walk of expediency, contradicted themselves time and